CC Magazine Spring 2024

PRECIOUS CARGO

Departments

Notebook West African dance, In the Round, Watsons and a Fulbright, campus construction, Principal on Wheels, Ink & Tracks, Effigy, Grief Is for People, Professors Are Not the Problem, twotime national champ, The President-elect

On the cover: Volunteer medical courier Marsha Williams ’81 at the Cincinnati/ Northern Kentucky International Airport. See story on page 22. Photo by Sean D. Elliot

On this page: A full rainbow over campus in April. Photo by Sean D. Elliot

Precious Cargo Marsha Williams ’81 crisscrosses the globe transporting hope in the form of bone marrow and stem cells.

Monkey See, Monkey Remember? Christopher Krupenye ’11 proves humans’ closest relatives can recognize friends they haven’t seen for decades.

Adobe Mission Professor Emeritus Frank Graziano is working to preserve New Mexico’s cultural heritage one historic church at a time.

I Can’t Live Without My Radio Appealing to eclectic music lovers everywhere, WCNI thrives even in the era of Big Streaming.

A Year to Remember at Connecticut College

There are musical themes in life that offer solace and satisfaction. A favorite song reminds one of memorable events. I bet everyone can connect a song to meeting your first love or your current one. Songs also characterize lost loves and disappointing relationships. We even have musical favorites to exercise to, to play while cooking, to hum the melody while just doing nothing or being absorbed in a hobby.

Our minds have wonderful ways of remembering as well as experiencing yesterday as we prepare to handle today and tomorrow. A year with the Conn family will always have special memories for me. I do like Broadway and Marni Nixon’s (dubbing for Debra Kerr) singing “Getting to Know You” from The King and I by Rodgers and Hammerstein (1956). It is so descriptive of my year as interim president. As I look fondly back over the past year, let me share some random thoughts.

• I will think quite differently about camels.

• I won’t be able to look at plumbing and electrical issues without a camel image popping into my mind.

• The idyllic nature of Conn’s campus will be my touchstone for a place where teaching and learning is 24/7/365. And that teaching is incredibly good, among the best I’ve seen.

• Every time I think of the many wonderful people I’ve met and worked with, a Zoom picture of everyone’s photo will pop into my mind.

• Conn will always represent what a campus community can do when you’re committed to its purpose. While money is important, it comes secondary to Conn’s experience.

• Conn will also symbolize aspiration and resilience. Our students will improve this world.

• I’ve never experienced such loud hockey cheering coming from so few people. What spirit!

• Same goes for nearly every sport on campus.

• I thought Frisbee fun went away in the ’70s. Not at Conn. I enjoyed the view walking home.

• Is there a student here who isn’t connected to at least two or more clubs or intramural sports while also being an incredible student? A powerful lesson about residential campus living.

• Wonderful dance performances, something I always wanted to do and admire at Conn.

There are so many more impressions to share. But there is something much more existential and meaningful that I have given much thought to. I have said often that I’d rather have talent than money. So true at Conn. The reason this phrase is so meaningful to me is the amount of talent found in nearly every corner on campus.

And not just talent that’s productive; more importantly, talent that’s human. I’ve enjoyed the staff who make my lunch; they are genuine. Just like the grounds team, public safety staff, faculty, cabinet members. And the staff I see each day on the second floor of Fanning. They accepted me as a person coming for a short time to help them move the needle on morale, sensibility, attitude and, best of all, hope. I hope I did all that.

I could feel the campus breathe more easily about December, and by February one could feel the campus body relax. The disquiet from last spring isn’t totally gone, but the relief is evident. A wise person on campus told me it feels like one can smile more easily. A compliment I take seriously. There is much be done to restore a better sense of unity and respect for one another. Make an effort to simply talk and convene across lines, beyond personal ideations. Accept your co-workers as allies from the first time you meet to perhaps every meeting.

The world is having a tough time right now. I’ve always believed that my prime motivation and commitment to teaching and learning are about creating peacemakers. We need to create many more to change things for the better.

Thank you, Connecticut College students, faculty and staff—and Camels everywhere!

CONNECTICUT COLLEGE Magazine

From the Interim President CC

VICE PRESIDENT FOR MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS: John Cramer

EDITOR: Amy Martin

ART DIRECTOR: Benjamin Parent

STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER: Sean D. Elliot

SENIOR WRITER: Melissa Babcock Johnson

WRITER: Tim Stevens ’03

CLASS NOTES COMPILED BY: Alumni Relations

CC Magazine is published by the Office of Communications. We are committed to covering a diverse group of stories in order to profile the human condition as seen through—and sometimes written by—our alumni, faculty, students and staff; we strive to publish features and photography that illuminate the College’s story.

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CONNECTICUT COLLEGE BOARD OF TRUSTEES Debo P. Adegbile ’91, Chair, Seth W. Alvord ’93, Vice Chair, Jessica L. Archibald ’95, Betty Brown Bibbins ’73, Maria Wyckoff Boyce ‘85, Vice Chair, Ethan W. Brown ’94, Isaac H. Clothier V ’79 P’10, Loulie Sutro Crawford ’89, Lawrence B. Damon III ’93, Mark D. Fallon ’92 P’27, Marisa G. Fariña ’93, Gregory J. Gigliotti ‘88, Hannah E. Gonzalez ’23, Young Alumni Trustee, Kim-An Hernandez ’99, Steven W. Jacobson ‘85 P’22, Samirah Jaigirdar ’22, Young Alumni Trustee, Jonathan A. Krane ’90, Sydney L. Lamb ’21, Young Alumni Trustee, John D. Linehan P’18 ’23 ’24, Jonathan D. McBride ’92, Sarah A. Mudho ’98, Devon Danz Preston ’93, Leslie Rosen ’02, Peter D. Skaperdas P’17, Dwayne C. Stallings ’99, Diane E. Stratton ’91, Maarten D. Terry ’83, Rajneesh Vig ’93, Leslie E. Wong, Interim President, John S. Zeiler ’74

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Thomas N. Anderson ’07, Angela Bannerman Ankoma ’97, Laila Bera ’23, Michael Boswell ’10, Isaac H. Clothier V ’79 P’10, President, Saveena Dhall ’94, Vice President, Philip M. Dolan Jr. ’88, Susan Mabrey Gaud ’68 P’07, Judith Epstein Grollman ’58, Susan Peck Hinkel ’65, M. Grant Hogan ’07, Deion Jordan ’17, Betty Fluegelman Kahn ’68 P’92, Mario Laurenzi ’90, Jennifer Lapan Mann ’94, Secretary, Erin Holstein Mogel ’09, Derrick M. Newton ’17, Jacob Nozaki ’22, Steve C. Owen ’80 P’12, Priyanka Ramchurn ’21, Allan Rogers ’14, Harris R. Rosenheim ’09, Vice President, Katrina Sanders ’92, Tamsen Bales Sharpless ’89, An-Ming Sze Truxes ’71, Aidyn P. Urena ’10, Richard C. Vancil ’82 P’13, Veronica Venture ’86, Denise L. Wheeless ’80, Mariko Wilcox ’99

CC Magazine Copyright 2024 by Connecticut College, all rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect official policy of the College. For Class Notes submissions: classnotes@conncoll.edu Visit us online at ccmagazine.conncoll.edu.

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Sean D. Elliot

West African Dance

Associate Professor of Dance

Shani Collins led a West African dance workshop for participants in the groundbreaking “Igniting Emancipatory Possibilities through African Diaspora Dance” summit held on campus Feb. 8-10.

More than 100 dance enthusiasts, artists, scholars, students and practitioners gathered at Conn for workshops, presentations and a keynote performance from legendary choreographer Ronald K. Brown’s dance group EVIDENCE. The summit was designed to celebrate and explore the richness and diversity of African diaspora dance, delve into its historical

and cultural significance, and create a community particularly to envision and embody emancipatory possibilities for the future of African diaspora dance in predominantly white contexts.

“This is the future of dance in higher education—focusing on the decolonization of dance education,” said Dance Department Chair Rachel Boggia, who co-organized the summit.

Professor David Dorfman ’84, founder of the influential modern dance troupe and Conn’s company-in-residence David Dorfman Dance, said it’s a particularly important focus for Conn, a leader in dance education since the 1940s.

“We have been working avidly on

an anti-racist curriculum that centers African diasporic dance as a source of not only so much of the movement experienced in all dance today, but as the cultural underpinnings of the art form we love so much,” he said. “The summit was absolutely transformative for our students in and around our incredible dance department here at Conn.”

In her welcome address, Collins called the summit “a magical moment” a long time in the making.

“We want to take a moment to think about how many people’s shoulders we’re standing on to be here today,” she said. “We are the manifestation of our ancestors’ dreams.”

Sean D. Elliot

In the Round

DIRECTING LOVE

Joaquín Morales ’24, a film studies major and philosophy minor, directed the music video for “Love For Ya,” a new single by Grammy award-winning artist Lil’ Kim and Tayy Brown. Morales filmed the video in New York City alongside several Conn alumni and students, including Tom Awnder ’22, Zack Bermack ’20, Jimmy Cork ’22, Ian Hopkins ’25 and Charlie Losiewicz ’19. ►

CERAMIX FOR PEACE

Noa Schmid ’25 has won a $10,000 Projects for Peace grant to offer a three-week summer workshop teaching Israeli and Palestinian teens the basics of hand-building ceramic sculptures at an artist studio in Gonen, Israel, near the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Safafa. The goal is to foster empathy and mutual respect and to teach the teens to use art-making to inspire change and collective healing. “The shared creation of art is a powerful vehicle for connection, as it is both a process-based means to peacebuilding and a product-oriented political end in and of itself,” Schmid said.

Fond Farewell to these retiring faculty

(Clockwise from top left)

Robert Baldwin, Art History

Jane Dawson, Government and Environmental Studies

Edward J. McKenna, Economics

Lawrence Vogel, Philosophy 42

Camels added to the Gift of Life Marrow Registry thanks to a campus “Cheek Swab Drive” hosted by Conn students participating in Gift of Life’s Campus Ambassador Program.

We

sit here on our

beloved Tempel Green, our minds racing with pictures of the ghosts of our younger selves.

—STUDENT SPEAKER GIANA DE LA CRUZ ’24 TO HER FELLOW GRADUATES AT CONN’S 106 TH COMMENCEMENT ON MAY 19

TOP 10 GARDEN

◄ The Hartford Courant named the Arboretum as one of the Top 10 Most Beautiful Gardens in Connecticut, and we couldn’t agree more. The Arboretum team manages four major plant collections featuring 6,195 individual, accessioned living plants, including magnificent magnolia trees, spectacular mountain laurels, towering rhododendrons and brightly colored poppies, bluebells, irises and hydrangeas.

Joaquín Morales ’24, left, with Tayy Brown in New York City.

Flame Azalea, Rhododendron Calendulaceum, in bloom on campus.

INTERNS AT THE READY

This summer, Conn students will complete internships with hundreds of companies and organizations, including:

■ Archaeological Conservation Institute

■ MUFG

■ Pfizer

■ International Tennis Hall of Fame

■ DraftKings

■ Wall Street Journal

■ Moody’s Ratings

■ Zoo New England

CARNEGIE AND FORD

Assistant Professor of Government Mara Suttmann-Lea was awarded a $200,000 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in May to conduct voter education research that seeks to fortify democracy in the United States. In April, Assistant Professor of History Kris Klein Hernández won a $50,000 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to complete his first book manuscript, The Color of the Army: Forts and Race-Making in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.

V EILED VOCALISTS

Migration

is central to the human experience.

— MOROCCAN AMERICAN AWARDWINNING AUTHOR LAILA LALAMI DURING A FEB. 26 VISIT TO CAMPUS

NESCAC CHAMPS

◄ Alexa Estes ’26 won the 800 Meters and Grace McDonough ’26 won the 1500 Meters at the 2024 NESCAC Women’s Track and Field Championships in April. Both runners set school records with their performances, finishing with times of 2:11.66 and 4:31.62, respectively.

$38,208

Raised to support the New London Homeless Hospitality Center through the annual Walk to End Homelessness. More than 500 people—including more than 100 members of the Conn community—participated in the April 28 event, which is organized each year by student scholars in the Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy in partnership with the center.

Students in costume competed in the inaugural Student Activities Council Veiled Vocalist competition in the 1962 Room in February. Seven student singers competed in three rounds, voted on by the audience, for a $500 shopping spree. Shawnia Yon ’24 was unveiled as the winner at the conclusion of the event, which was hosted by magician and comedian Joseph Tran. Runner-up was Xenia Bernal ’24. ►

Alexa Estes ’26

Sean D. Elliot

Sean D. Elliot

Going for Gold

Maggie Shea ’11, who finished 11th in the Women’s Skiff – 49erFX at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, will represent the United States once again at the 2024 Games in Paris this summer.

Shea and her longtime skipper Stephanie Roble officially qualified for the U.S. Olympic team in April.

“I’m so honored for the opportunity

to represent Team USA and compete on the U.S. Olympic team,” Shea said. “I’m grateful and excited for a second chance to deliver our best performance on the Olympic stage. We’ve learned so much in the last three years since Tokyo and in our eight years sailing the FX together. It’s rare that you get a second crack at things in life and I’m really thankful for that chance.”

Two Watsons and a Fulbright

Three graduating seniors have been awarded prestigious fellowships.

Sophie Demaisy ’24 and Leslie Villegas ’24 will each receive $40,000 from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation to fund a year of exploration and discovery. Cecily Hetzel ’24 will teach English to children in the Canary Islands after winning a Fulbright U.S. Student Program English Teaching Assistantship grant.

Demaisy, an economics and botany double major from Quebec City, Canada, will travel to Costa Rica, Brazil, Kenya, Madagascar and Indonesia to explore sustainable agriculture through coffee production.

“By using coffee as a model crop, I hope to get insight into how communities

adapt to the challenges of growing crops sustainably, and investigate the practicality and economic viability of implementing sustainable agriculture on a global scale,” said Demaisy, who plans to enroll in a graduate degree program in a field related to food production following her Watson Fellowship.

Villegas, a computer science and anthropology double major from the Bronx, New York, will travel to the Philippines, Belize, Mexico, India and Japan to explore how technology can enhance diverse ways of being in the world, particularly within indigenous communities.

“I will examine how different communities integrate technology into their daily lives, how cultural values shape

At Conn, Shea led the Women’s Sailing team to a second-place finish at the 2011 ICSA Women’s Nationals. She was recognized as an All-American Honorable Mention and NEISA Sportswoman of the Year.

The 2024 Olympic Women’s Skiff –49erFX races are scheduled to begin July 28.

technological developments, and how new technologies influence cultural practices and traditions,” Villegas said. “I aspire to be an advocate for sensitive ways of developing new technologies.”

Hetzel, a psychology major and Hispanic studies minor from Libertyville, Illinois, is looking forward to immersing herself in a Spanish-speaking country.

“I believe bilingualism is an important skill that has granted me access to new perspectives and enriched my understanding of the world. As a Fulbright ETA, I want to inspire students to see language as a portal to understanding,” she said.

Following her Fulbright, Hetzel plans to pursue a career as a forensic psychologist.

Maggie Shea ’11 and Stephanie Roble compete at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Campus Improvements Underway

Big things are happening this summer as construction is now underway for three capital projects that will transform the heart of campus: the partial renovation of the College Center at Crozier-Williams, the conversion of Cro Boulevard into a pedestrian promenade and the creation of a Cro-Plex connector, which will eliminate vehicle traffic to create a unifying, open green space. Silfen Field and Track will also get a facelift, and other improvements include modernizing residence hall bathrooms.

The renovation of Cro focuses on four key areas: the entry along Cro Boulevard, Oasis Snack Shop, Cro’s Nest and the 1962 Room. The new entrance will feature welcoming pathways, landscaping and seating. Inside, students, faculty, staff and visitors will find a light and spacious entry that invites them into the redesigned Oasis eatery with an outdoor patio on the first floor or upstairs to the transformed Cro’s Nest, which will feature indoor and outdoor space for gatherings and performances. The 1962 Room, one of the largest multipurpose spaces on campus, will feature enhanced technology and a flexible seating design to accommodate events of all sizes.

“The new Cro will be a vibrant hub for campus life that will nurture even stronger connections among students, faculty and staff,” said Dean of Students Victor Arcelus.

Renovating Cro was a key recommendation of the College’s 2018 master plan and a priority for the Defy Boundaries campaign. Funding for the project includes generous support from Devon Preston ’93 P’28, Susan Lynch ’62, an anonymous donor and the Class of 1969 Memorial Campus Beautification and Improvement Fund. The project is expected to be completed by February 2025.

The Crozier-Williams Boulevard project was identified as a priority in the College’s two most recent master plans. The boulevard will be converted from a roadway and parking area into a pedestrian promenade that connects the community from the southernmost to the northernmost points of campus. Parking and vehicle traffic will also be eliminated between Cro and the Plex residence halls. That area will instead feature pedestrian pathways, vegetation and areas for students to study, relax and gather in

small groups. Both projects are critical to advancing the College’s pedestrian safety priorities identified as part of a 2016 study. They will be completed in phases beginning this summer and continuing through 2025.

“These two projects will help make the center and north end of the campus more accessible and create the same pedestrian-focused experience we have on the south end of the campus around Tempel Green,” said Interim Vice President of Administration Justin Wolfradt.

The Cro Boulevard project was made possible with generous support from Rob ’88 and Karen Hale P’20.

Additional summer projects include the construction of a gated parking lot for faculty and staff on the east side of campus to absorb displaced parking from Cro Boulevard; a new path from Zachs Hillel House connecting to central campus and the Plex; bathroom privacy renovations in Smith, Burdick and Larrabee residence houses; and the renovation of Silfen Field and Track with new high-performance turf and a new Beynon BSS 10000 track surface.

JaredLamb ’03 has carved out a unique section of the internet. The principal of BASIS Baton Rouge–Materra, a K-10 charter school, Lamb found himself going unexpectedly viral, thanks, in part, to his unusual office—a rolling cart he wheels around as he goes about his day.

“The cart started, really, out of necessity,” Lamb explains. “The school didn’t have a conference room, so I said, ‘You know what, why don’t we convert the principal’s office?’ We had an extra AV cart, so I just made that my mobile office.”

He quickly found benefits beyond saving space.

“I never really got to my office much anyway,” the principal says. “The cart gave me lots of opportunities to take the pulse of what was happening on campus at any time.”

Lamb, a former math and science teacher who has worked as a principal for 15 years, says he prioritizes “educator customer service”—supporting his teachers so they can support the students. Being mobile allows him to connect daily with teachers and students, help out when behavior situations arise, make copies or fetch supplies and even stand in for a teacher in need of a bathroom break.

He noticed a difference in how students interact with him as well.

“I think there’s a stronger trust. I have more touch points with students now. I’m asking them about their day. I’m constantly getting high-fives. I’m giving fist bumps as they enter and leave the classroom.”

Principal on Wheels

While the cart may have made him popular on campus, it was TikTok that made him internet famous.

“I’d read an article about another Louisiana principal who was using the TikTok platform to showcase what was happening on campus in an effort to recruit teachers,” Lamb remembers. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s a great idea.’”

The Saturday after the 2022-2023 school year ended (he does all his social media work outside of school hours), Lamb headed to campus to film his first TikTok video, which he captioned: “I spent the entire school year without an office. And here’s why it was the best decision.”

“I didn’t even know how to use the TikTok platform,” Lamb admits. “I couldn’t figure out how to watch the video until after I posted it. Then I remember texting my wife to tell her, ‘Honey, there are already 15 people who watched my video!’”

Call it beginner’s luck, but 15 quickly turned into 1.7 million.

“For whatever reason, it clicked with the algorithms and took off overnight. I woke up in the morning and just had all these updates. I was not expecting so many messages or commentary, never mind how big it got. It was shocking.”

Lamb harnessed that initial success and quickly produced more videos about school routines, summertime prep, teacher professional development and, of course, more about his trusty cart. The viral videos even caught the attention of the Today show, which covered the story in September.

Lamb now boasts more than 104,000 TikTok followers, and his top video (yes, also about the cart) has more than 2.4 million views. But what Lamb is most proud of is how the social media engagement has sparked conversation among his peers and colleagues in education.

“There’s so much negativity out there in the education landscape right now. I’m sharing the things we’re doing and then seeing other educators do the same, looking at their data and getting their feedback. I think that’s great—getting positive stuff out there. That’s encouraged me to keep doing it,” he says.

“It is so important to highlight the amazing work that our educators are doing. I really don’t believe that education facilities are broken systems. Yes, there are things we can improve on and make stronger. But we have so many educators who show up every day and work for students. That’s worth celebrating. The cart and social media allow me to bring that positivity out.”

Keeping the Peace in the Village: Conflict and Peacemaking in Germany, 1650-1750

By Marc R. Forster, Henry B. Plant Professor of History

Based on extensive archival research, this book is a study of how rural German society evolved in the century after 1650. In the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, an understandable desire for peace and order co-existed with the reality of day-to-day conflicts common to any face-to-face community. The interplay of peacemaking and conflict at the local level, and the growing role of local courts, had important implications for the growth of state power.

The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics

By Joshua Green ’94

In his No. 1 New York Times bestseller Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green chronicled how the forces of economic populism on the right, led by the likes of Steve Bannon, turned Donald Trump into their flawed but powerful vessel. In The Rebels, he gives an epic account of the long struggle that has played out in parallel on the left, told through an intimate reckoning with the careers of the three political figures who have led the charge most prominently. Based on

remarkable inside sourcing and razorsharp analysis, The Rebels uses the grand narrative of a political party undergoing tumult and transformation to tell an even larger story about the fate of America.

Erase Me

By Nikoo McGoldrick

and James McGoldrick ’77 (writing as May McGoldrick and Jan Coffey)

In the sun-soaked streets of a California beach town, two strangers’ paths collide, sparking an unexpected and fiery connection. Brought together by chance, they quickly discover that fate has a twisted sense of humor. And their entanglement is far from your typical love story—both harbor secrets, lead double lives and are on missions of paramount importance, setting the stage for a high-stakes battle of wits and wills.

Bad Day for Grandpa

By Barry R. Norman ’79

This collection of short stories “and other drivel”—inspired by real life events that then take on a life of their own—includes “Radio Banksy,” a story inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s appearance at the dedication of Conn’s Charles E. Shain Library in 1976. Other stories touch on the impact of the pandemic on the retired community and how aging can end up causing a bad day for Grandpa.

Ink & Tracks

Confessions of a Grateful Substitute Teacher

By Barry R. Norman ’79

This compelling memoir chronicles the unexpected journey of a seasoned professional from the film, TV and music industries, who, after selling a Maine-based movie theater, finds himself in an unplanned return to the workforce due to the challenges brought about by the COVID pandemic. Confessions of a Grateful Substitute Teacher is a testament to resilience, adaptability and the profound connections that can be forged in the unlikeliest of places.

The Whole Elephant: Unlocking Solutions to the Chaos in My Life and Yours

By Jo Vanderkloot

’62

P’85 ’88 with Judy Kirmmse

Jo Vanderkloot never understood what was at work inside her wealthy family until she went to work in one of the most dangerous places in America: the 1980s South Bronx. There she found the chaos of her family on a massive scale—and she understood it was coming for all of us. To stop it rolling over you, you have to look at the whole elephant, Vanderkloot and Kirmmse argue in this compelling memoir.

Effigy

Students’ documentary short brings a New London tradition to Rome

BY TIM STEVENS ’03

When Benedict Arnold defected to the British during the American Revolution, he likely didn’t imagine a crowd would burn him in effigy some 240 years later as part of an annual event in the very city he sought to reduce to ash. And given the concept of film didn’t even exist in the 1780s, he certainly would’ve had no idea that a pair of Conn students would make a documentary short about that tradition that would send them to Italy and The COLiseum International Film FEstival (COLIFFE).

Unfortunately for America’s most famous traitor, the future has a way of being unpredictable. Meanwhile, filmmakers Timothy Friend ’25 and Ian Hopkins ’25, the Camels behind Effigy, couldn’t be happier with the outcome.

In the doc, they mix onsite interviews with footage of the 2023 Flock Theatre Burning of Benedict Arnold Festival. The result is a blast of experiential storytelling that allows the viewer to feel like part of the festival while also maintaining enough distance to provide context and insight.

Friend and Hopkins were still in their first week of a fall semester

“Documentary Production” course when Hopkins got an email from Flock advertising the festival. “I thought, ‘Oh, we should totally film this,’” recalls Hopkins, a film studies major from Chicago, Illinois. “We had to get special permission for it because it was so early in the semester.”

With Professor Ross Morin’s approval, the two set to work.

“We started with [the festival] because it would be really fun, but we started to think, ‘How can we find a larger meaning in this?’” explains Friend, who hails from West Newbury, Massachusetts, and is also majoring in film.

Given the current state of American politics, the two quickly found deeper meaning in an annual tradition of using fire to purge historical monsters. But finding the right tone proved more difficult.

“Our rough cut … went too far over the edge of politics. Professor Morin was critical in guiding us through fixing that,” Hopkins says.

The final cut still pulses with political implication, but by avoiding didactic messaging, Effigy takes on an evergreen quality. It is about 2023 and 1781, of

course, but one can easily see America’s other crises, past and yet to be, in the “mob’s” actions, and hear them in the participants’ voices.

After presenting the film in class as part of a semester’s-end screening event, Friend submitted Effigy to COLIFFE. The festival received 1,778 submissions from 108 countries; of those, only 140—including Effigy—reached the final phase. The film then went on to snag a Best Direction Award in the International Short Films category for the duo.

Winning was “very validating,” Friend says.

While interest in the film continues— it was also screened at the Flame University FirstCut Film Festival in India—Hopkins and Friend are both hard at work with new collaborators on new projects for their “Film 310: Ideological Representation in Motion Picture Production” course. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t still working together.

“We’ll be crewing each other’s films,” Hopkins says.

“That’s just how it is with film here,” adds Friend. “Even if we aren’t partners, we are all involved.”

Grief Is for People is really my attempt to imitate that strange rollercoaster of grief. And sometimes that includes this dark humor.

— SLOANE CROSLEY ’00

Jennifer Livingston

Grief Is for People

With her trademark humor, author Sloane Crosley ’00 mourns the loss of a close friend

BY TIM STEVENS ’03

It may not have been a great time for anyone, but 2019-2020 was particularly harrowing for New York Times bestselling author Sloane Crosley ’00. In a painful pileup, she lost a close friend, book publicist Russell Perreault, to suicide, and had her apartment burgled. Then, she had to watch as the world just outside her window sank into a pandemic.

In her eighth book and first memoir, Grief Is for People, Crosley takes readers with her on a journey through “loss and grief and the sort of uneven topography” of the human experience.

“It’s about these two successive events, these gradually increasing losses and how they all connect,” she says. “It’s about trying to figure out where certain kinds of mourning belong and who gets to mourn and over what, about that struggle between figuring out what’s a big deal and what’s not.”

With such heavy topics, it can be easy to forget that Crosley is an extremely funny author. Her essays, including those in the collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number and Look Alive Out There, and novels, including The Clasp and Cult Classic, are replete with sly observations and outright guffaw-inducing

punchlines. In Grief, that humor still saturates her prose.

“It’s how I express myself,” says Crosley. “I’m not saying I’m the funniest person in the world, but it is what I have. I’ve read things from other writers on similar topics, and they’re startlingly beautiful. I find myself somewhat envious of that. But I’ve realized these are the tools I use to get to the same topic and drill down to the core of it. They’re funny, and they’re not pretty.

“Grief Is for People is really my attempt to imitate that strange rollercoaster of grief. And sometimes that includes this dark humor. The person I really love most dies in this horrible way. I am deeply unlucky that this incredibly funny person died. But, when it comes to a book, I am incredibly lucky. Because now you have two inappropriate people driving this car.”

One of the most anticipated books of the year, Grief became an instant New York Times bestseller when it was released in late February. Since then, Crosley’s been promoting the book on a press tour that included a stop at The Daily Show.

When asked how she feels about

looking back on both the person she was when she lived through 2019-2020 and when she wrote the book, Crosley admits it can be a challenge.

“I feel sometimes unqualified to talk about my books because of how long it takes to produce a book. In the case of Grief Is for People, that anxiety, that apprehension that I’m slightly removed from it is actually incredibly pronounced,” she says.

To further explain herself, she turns to the author she describes as her “personal bard,” Truman Capote.

“I think Capote had a quote about how writers should only start after their tears have dried. Not to disagree, but I feel like maybe the tears are dry but the tissues are still wet. You have to find that point,” she says.

“I’m not the biggest fisherwoman— which I am sure will surprise the readers of CC Magazine—but I know there’s certain kinds of fly fishing where you are trying to attract a fish, and then there’s others where you’re almost just trying to get in the way of the fish. And I feel like nonfiction personal writing is like that. It’s about the timing. If I were to start writing this book now, I don’t think I could do it.”

Professors Are Not the Problem

What the ‘viewpoint diversity’ movement gets wrong

BY SIMON FELDMAN AND AFSHAN JAFAR

Railing against “indoctrination” in academia has become a favorite pastime for people and politicians along the political spectrum. This accusation is the justification behind removing an entire discipline from general education curricula in Florida. It lies behind banning books across libraries and K-12 schools. And it partly explains the sad state of college course catalogs, which have been whittled down until they resemble emaciated half-reflections of their former glorious selves, in these times of fiscal and political uncertainty for many institutions. In less overt and explicit ways, it also lies behind the ban on “political statements” at a liberal arts institution like Barnard College.

The assertion at the center of claims about colleges indoctrinating students is that professors don’t teach students how to think, they teach them what to think. This criticism forms the basis of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s request to review syllabi for diversitythemed courses at George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth Universities. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis believes professors have been trying to

“indoctrinate and stuff.” Others accuse academia of unbridled “social activism.” Some critics simply assert the seemingly politically neutral and, to many, commonsensical claim that professors should be focused on teaching students “how to think for themselves.”

This claim underlies Caitlin Flanagan’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “Colleges Are Lying to Their Students” (adapted from the introduction of her book, On Thinking for Yourself), in which she argues that professors are more interested in teaching students what to think than how to think. Flanagan asserts, “A teacher should never do your thinking for you. She should give you texts to read and guide you along the path of making sense of them for yourself. She should introduce you to the books and essays of writers who disagree with one another and ask you to determine whose case is better.”

But learning how to think can’t stop there. Nor at “expos[ing] students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks”—the pedagogical method of choice offered by a new Indiana law that would deny tenure and promotion to professors who are “unlikely” to follow this approach.

Such an approach to “free inquiry” and “intellectual diversity”—one that seeks to end “viewpoint discrimination” by including all viewpoints—fails to take into account that professors are not merely curators of readings; we are also trained in analyzing and assessing the rigor and quality of arguments and evidence. How can we teach students how to assess or evaluate someone’s arguments without conveying judgments about the merits of those arguments? This is how we teach our students the distinction between opinion and academic inquiry, modeling the use of methodologies that yield some actual intellectual verdicts. Learning how to determine whose argument is better is not a skill that can simply be absorbed via osmosis by being exposed to readings.

Giving students readings on “both sides” of climate change, evolution or the Holocaust, hoping that they come to the conclusion that these phenomena/events are real or that climate change demands action or the Holocaust is a moral atrocity, is an unreasonable expectation. While some may find this controversial, we think that facts, reason and logic, on their own, are actually never sufficient to establish the truth of any moral position

How can we teach students how to assess or evaluate someone’s arguments without conveying judgments about the merits of those arguments?

at all (nor, for that matter, are they always readily discernible from lies, unreason and ill logic). This is because the domain of right and wrong does not overlap perfectly with the domains of science and logic. As we have probably all experienced, it is possible for people to agree on a set of facts and the rules of logic and still disagree, for perfectly reasonable reasons, about moral matters. This means we must sometimes try to persuade each other of what to think using some methods that are not purely logical, including by having students “try on” particular ideas, or practice certain lines of argument.

As the rise of white nationalism, antisemitism and Islamophobia suggests, the idea that a value-neutral pedagogy focused on exposing students to facts and logic and “both sides” of arguments is sufficient for sustaining a multicultural democracy is naive, at best. We also need to express our condemnation and make those ideas socially unacceptable. We also ought not to let people think all on their own when they are in the grip of such terrifying beliefs. Asking a white supremacist to consider “What is the best argument of the other side?”—

the seemingly value-neutral question Flanagan reports her father routinely asked her while growing up—is not a recipe for moral transformation.

“The truth wins out in the marketplace of ideas.” Some admirable Enlightenment thinkers surely thought that, but no one living through this current era of easily disseminated enticing and conspiratorial falsehoods could think that truth has a chance without intervention by those who have the training to discern good research from bad, facts from opinion, evidence from propaganda. We rightly must care about what our students think.

The bare-bones model of “thinking for oneself” and considering the best argument(s) of the other side, or reading a variety of ideological and political viewpoints, is not close to being up to the tasks at hand, which include responding in real time to cultures of disinformation and attempting to persuade others, for instance, that we need to take action on climate change or take a moment to think about the implications of free and powerful artificial intelligence.

The various bills and laws insisting on “intellectual diversity,” and banning Critical Race Theory and diversity,

equity and inclusion, in Florida and a number of other states, reinforce the mistaken view that indoctrination by professors is the biggest problem in higher education today. This perspective entirely misses the mark on what’s ailing American higher education. It’s not that students’ ability to think for themselves is at risk from what professors do or say in the classroom. The biggest threat to free inquiry at colleges and universities currently comes from censorship and political interference in academia. From campus administrations curtailing student protests, to trustees and politicians imposing an ideological litmus test on professors in the guise of “intellectual diversity,” while dictating our curricula and our campus programming, censorship has come to academia. And its flanks are advancing from the right and the left, led by politicians, donors, alumni, administrators and trustees—not professors.

Simon Feldman is an associate professor of philosophy and Afshan Jafar is the May Buckley Sadowski ’19 Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College. This piece was originally published by Inside Higher Ed.

Making a Splash

NCAA Swimmer of the Year

Justin Finkel ’25 wins two events at the NCAA DIII Championships

Justin Finkel ’25 was crowned national champion—twice—after winning the 500 freestyle and the 200 butterfly at the 2024 NCAA Division III Men’s Swimming & Diving Championships at the Greensboro Aquatic Center in Greensboro, North Carolina, March 20-22. He becomes just the second Conn student-athlete to win multiple national titles, and the first to do so in the same NCAA Championship.

Finkel made his first trip to the top of the podium on the first day of competition. After turning in the fastest time in the morning preliminaries for the 500 free, Finkel swam a controlled race in the finals that saw him power to the finish in 4:21.32, breaking his own school and NESCAC records in the process.

“I had a lot more in the last half than I thought I would. I went out how I wanted to, but I’m just glad I had that last kick in the end,” said Finkel, a biology major from Cheshire, Connecticut.

“It certainly means a lot,” Finkel added of his first national title. “It’s a dream of every swimmer. I’ve been working on this for a while, so I’m glad I’m finally here, and it’s a dream come true.”

Finkel wouldn’t have to wait long for his second national title. After finishing fourth in the 200 freestyle on the second day of competition, he won the 200 fly in NCAA Division III recordbreaking fashion on day three.

Finkel is the first men’s swimmer in Camel history to qualify for championship finals in three individual events at the same NCAA Championship, and he earned All-America honors in each. And while he was the only member of Conn’s Men’s Swimming and Diving team to compete, Finkel scored 55 points, which placed Connecticut College 17th overall out of 44 scoring teams. In February, Finkel was named NESCAC Swimmer of the Year for the second consecutive year.

The President-elect

Andrea E. Chapdelaine, a visionary leader and champion of the liberal arts, will serve as Conn’s 12th president

During her first official visit to campus on April 24, Presidentelect Andrea E. Chapdelaine was welcomed by hundreds of students, faculty and staff in the College Center at Crozier-Williams. After introductory remarks by Board of Trustee Chair Debo P. Adegbile ’91, who co-chaired the 15-member Presidential Search Committee, Chapdelaine took to the podium to address the Conn community for the first time.

“This is such an exciting day and I’m thrilled to be here,” Chapdelaine said. “I am very much looking forward to coming to an institution that is fully focused on a rich undergraduate experience, fully dedicated to the liberal arts and putting it into action for our students.”

A strategic leader and compassionate community builder, Chapdelaine has more than 30 years of experience in higher education, having served as a professor, dean, provost and, since 2015, president of Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. She was unanimously appointed by the Board of Trustees to serve as a Connecticut College’s 12th president in March after an extensive

and inclusive search process. Her tenure will officially begin July 1.

“President-elect Chapdelaine has a track record of success in consensus-building and sound financial stewardship, as well as a clear understanding of both the complexities of and possibilities for liberal arts colleges and their students,” Adegbile wrote in his announcement of Chapdelaine’s selection to the campus community.

“In this pivotal moment for Conn and for higher education broadly, she inspires enthusiasm for what our College can do as we build on our 113-year-old mission and more recent achievements. She has the vision, experience and management capabilities to lead our College community forward.”

At Hood, Chapdelaine led two ambitious strategic planning initiatives and bolstered academic programs, increased enrollment and retention, expanded experiential learning opportunities, established new structures and processes for fostering inclusivity and full participation, improved compensation and benefits for faculty and staff, enabled critical

investments in campus facilities and strengthened the institution’s financial position. In 2017, she launched Hood’s first comprehensive campaign in more than 25 years, which met 150% of its original goal, and she secured a $54 million gift, the largest in the institution’s history. During her tenure, Hood’s endowment grew by 103%.

“I am particularly excited about the proven experience that President-elect Chapdelaine brings to Conn from her nine years of successfully leading a college that, in many ways, embodies the opportunities and challenges of our College and other liberal arts colleges in our country,” said Maria Wyckoff Boyce ’85, vice chair of Conn’s Board of Trustees and co-chair of the Presidential Search Committee. “She is ready to serve our College on day one.”

Chapdelaine’s selection was the culmination of a thorough and collaborative nine-month national search. The Presidential Search Committee included 15 faculty, staff, students and trustees, and an additional 34 faculty, staff, student and trustee representatives were invited to interview finalists. The search

process, led by the executive search and leadership advisory firm WittKieffer, also included 43 community engagement meetings and numerous surveys, with more than 540 faculty, staff, students, alumni, parents and friends of the College providing input.

A proud first-generation college graduate, Chapdelaine earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in justice studies from the University of New Hampshire and master’s and doctoral degrees in social psychology from the University of Connecticut. She began her academic career at Wabash College in 1993 and taught at Trinity College beginning in 1995. In 1998, she joined the psychology faculty at Albright College, where she also served as dean of undergraduate studies, provost and vice president of academic affairs.

A noted scholar of social psychology and justice studies, Chapdelaine serves as a tenured faculty member in Hood’s psychology department, having taught first-year seminars and social psychology at the graduate level. Her most recent scholarly work has focused on supporting faculty through policies designed to

promote flexibility and work-life balance, the value of undergraduate research to student learning and ethical issues in service learning.

A hallmark of Chapdelaine’s career has been her ability to bring people together to build stronger communities. At Hood, she established the Division of Community and Inclusivity to foster a sense of belonging and advance diversity and equity efforts. She worked diligently to establish community partnerships and serves on numerous community boards. Nationally, she is a member of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the Council of Independent Colleges board of directors.

Chapdelaine has deep roots in New England and has been a longtime admirer of Connecticut College. She grew up in Chicopee, Massachusetts, spent many summers at Misquamicut Beach in Westerly, Rhode Island, and completed her graduate studies in Connecticut. Her extended family lives in the region, she said, and coming to Conn already “feels like coming home.”

During her campus visit, Chapdelaine said she and her husband of 29 years, David Tetreault, are very much looking

forward to returning to Connecticut, where they met and started their family. They have two grown sons, Daniel and Benjamin, who both live within driving distance. She also told the audience about the other member of the new first family who will be moving onto campus, 15-month-old bernedoodle Koda. “She’s about 70 pounds of love, and, as I like to say, she is exuberant in her response to humanity,” Chapdelaine said, smiling. “She’s a campus dog, and she takes her role very seriously.”

In addition to the community meeting, Chapdelaine’s visit included a tour of the campus, a meeting with her newly appointed transition committee and a lively lunch with students.

“I cannot thank all of you enough for the warm support and the welcome I have received,” Chapdelaine told the students, faculty and staff.

“My first responsibility as the 12th president is to learn and embrace the College’s core values, points of pride and shared aspirations, and then work with the entire College community to articulate a collective vision of an exciting future grounded in Conn’s rich history.”

Photos by Sean D. Elliot

Changing of the guard: President-elect Chapdelaine walks the campus with Interim President Wong (right).

PRECIOUS CARGO

Marsha Williams ’81 crisscrosses the globe transporting hope in the form of bone marrow and stem cells.

BY MELISSA BABCOCK JOHNSON

Everyone was anxious for the plane to land. But Marsha Williams ’81 needed it to. Someone’s life could depend on it.

The plane had been circling—along with more than 20 others—over its destination airport for more than hour to allow severe thunderstorms to pass. But once the runways reopened, Williams’ pilot announced that the line to land was now too long for the amount of fuel left on the plane; it would be diverting to another airport. Williams would miss her connecting flight.

She could not miss that connecting flight.

Acting quickly, Williams handed a flight attendant the ace up her sleeve—a letter that read: “Marsha Williams is a trained courier carrying human cells for transplantation. It is imperative that the blood stem cells be transplanted without delay.”

Within minutes, the pilot made a new announcement: The flight would not be rerouted after all; the plane would be landing shortly.

Every year, thousands of people are diagnosed with life-threatening blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. For some patients, the best treatment is a blood stem cell transplant from a healthy donor whose DNA proteins and markers match theirs. NMDP (formerly Be The Match/National Marrow Donor Program) manages the world’s most diverse registry to help patients find their match.

The field has come a long way since the organization facilitated its first bone marrow transplant in 1987. Before then, most donors and patients were related. However, 70% of patients don’t have a fully matched donor in their family. Through NMDP’s blood stem cell donor registry, unrelated donors and patients can be matched across state lines and even international borders.

To ensure those potentially life-saving and delicate blood stem cells securely reach their intended recipient in time, they are hand-carried— sometimes thousands of miles—by volunteer medical couriers like Williams.

CORPORATE TO COURIER

Back in 2007, Williams, who double majored in psychology and English at Conn, was loving her corporate job as senior vice president of brand and consumer insights at Nickelodeon in New York City. But the long hours of intense market research and growing number of consumer insights presentations to ad sales and licensing partners were beginning to burn her out. She took a week off to join a Habitat for Humanity build in the Dominican Republic, fulfilling a long-held desire to help others. She loved it, she says. “I thought, ‘This is how I can volunteer.’”

But the little free time Williams had from her demanding career was precious, and it didn’t necessarily lend itself to volunteering. “Evenings and weekends were all about recovery, restoration and recharging,” she explains. “I did that build, and I thought I could do it one week a year—take a vacation and volunteer. But then I totally burned out and decided I needed to step away from corporate altogether.”

She moved home to Cincinnati and started her own market research business, Harvest Research Group LLC. She kept Nickelodeon as a client and added Lego, Discovery Networks, DreamWorks Animation TV, the Oprah Winfrey Network and more. But she was still looking for ways to give back.

She learned about medical courier opportunities by chance while on a hike more than a decade ago. Having been away from Cincinnati for more than 25 years, Williams had sought ways to reconnect with her hometown and joined a hiking MeetUp group. She noticed another member wearing a hat with the Be The Match logo. Williams approached him and mentioned she was in the donor registry.

“It turned out he was a courier for NMDP—the first courier in the Cincinnati area,” Williams recalled. “I said, ‘What does a courier do? What does that mean?’ And so, over the course of this hike, he explained volunteer couriers transport bone marrow or stem cells from wherever the donor is to wherever the patient is. I was like, ‘Oh, this sounds like something I would love to do.’”

The combination of travel and a flexible volunteer opportunity sounded perfect to Williams. Her fellow hiker connected her with NMDP, which began its extensive vetting process. “It’s not the kind of volunteer job where you say, ‘I’d like to volunteer,’ and they say, ‘Come on in and start,’” Williams says. “It’s almost like job hunting. You apply, interview and provide references. Then if you get approved, you have to pay for training out of pocket as a show of good faith and responsibility.”

She began training in January of 2014, then passed the exam. “If you pass the test, congratulations, you’re a courier,” she says. “They send you a medical cooler, and they teach you how to prep and sterilize it. If you get assigned a trip, you’ve got the cooler ready, they send you the paperwork you need and off you go.”

Couriers mostly carry bone marrow or stem cells collected through a process called apheresis, and sometimes plasma or T-cells. The harvested biological material must be kept within a specific temperature range in the specially manufactured, thermally protected medical transporter. The cooler can hold the proper temperature range for up to 96 hours. Couriers typically pick up cells from a hospital or clinic at the donor’s location and deliver them to one at the patient’s location, Williams explains. The door-to-door journey cannot exceed 48 hours, or the biological matter will begin to break down.

“You start off with domestic trips. If you’re interested in international, you have to do domestic for two years without any mistakes,” Williams explains. “Now I go all over the globe, and it is so cool.”

Williams has traveled to countries she might never have otherwise visited, she says, including Norway, Poland, Austria, Chile and Israel, which Williams says popped up a lot when she first began as a courier. The second largest Jewish population in the world after Israel is in the United States, so Jewish Americans are often matched with someone in Israel.

Couriers picking up must be in the donor’s country at least 48 hours before the cells are extracted so the cooler can be fully prepped and reach the correct temperature. Usually, couriers picking up get the two days before collecting the donation to prep the cooler and themselves for the pick-up, as well as to sightsee or otherwise experience the locale, and couriers dropping off overseas get two days afterward.

A RACE AGAINST TIME

Williams recently retired, giving her even more time to help save lives. Strict patient confidentiality rules mean she keeps dates and other identifying specifics of her trips under wraps. Most go off without a hitch, but what she can share about the ones that don’t is riveting.

Several years ago, when Williams was trying to fly back to the U.S. from Europe with stem cells, a bomb cyclone hit. East Coast airports were closed, but the airport where Williams was scheduled to land at 11:30 p.m. was set to reopen at 9:30 p.m., so her flight took off as planned.

Before the plane had even left the runway, its entertainment system crashed, meaning none of the monitors could display flight tracking details. “It seemed as if everyone went to sleep except me,” Williams says. “I watched Netflix from my iPad, determined to stay awake and reset back to Eastern time.”

Because the flight tracker was down, no one realized the pilot flew as far as Greenland before turning around and heading back to Europe—the U.S. destination airport never reopened, and international airports south of the storm were filled with other planes that had flown back believing they’d be able to land, too. So about eight hours after takeoff, Williams was right back where she started: on a different continent from the patient who needed the donor material she was carrying.

“I was now on the clock in a big way, having lost a whole day,” Williams says. “It was also daybreak the next morning in Europe, and I had not slept a wink. I discovered another courier on that flight in the exact same position.”

Just like before, Williams had to inform the airline she was carrying precious cargo in order to be rebooked with priority on a flight that would avoid the East Coast all together.

“Ultimately, I made it to my destination hospital with about three hours left on that 48-hour clock,” she says.

The occasional heart-pounding rush is well worth it for Williams, who is proud to play an integral role in getting patients the care they need.

“I love the fact that the success rate keeps improving,” she says. “Since I became a courier, the research has [shown] that stem cell transplants can also help put some autoimmune diseases into remission. I love that science keeps advancing and allowing for more success with cell therapy.”

I love that science keeps advancing and allowing for more success with cell therapy.

—MARSHA WILLIAMS ’81

Photos by Sean D. Elliot

Photos by Sean D. Elliot

MONKEY SEE, MONKEY REMEMBER?

Christopher Krupenye ’11 proves humans’ closest relatives can recognize friends they haven’t seen for decades.

BY AMY MARTIN

The 15 chimpanzees who live at Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo—Louis, Lucy, Eva, Sophie, Lianne, Heleen, Qafzeh, Kilimi, Rene, Paul, Frek, Edith, Liberius, Velu and Masindi— see more than 1,500 visitors every day. For the most part, they ignore their human admirers and simply go about their everyday chimp lives.

But when scientist Christopher Krupenye ’11 and his research colleagues arrive at the zoo, the reaction is noticeably different. The chimps they’ve met during previous visits will come right over, gesture and even try to communicate with these particular humans.

“Everyone I know who works with apes has had this experience where you go back to these places, sometimes years later, and it’s very apparent that the individuals that you bonded with are behaving very differently toward you than they are toward the average visitor to the zoo. They seem excited to see you,” Krupenye says.

“That experience has given us the impression that they must remember us, that we have this relationship that’s transcending these long periods of absence.”

But can great apes really recognize individuals they haven’t seen for years? How long does that social memory last? And what might that tell us about the origins of social memory in humans?

Those are the types of questions that have been driving Krupenye’s research into the social and cognitive abilities of humans’ closest relatives for more than a decade. After earning a Ph.D. in evolutionary anthropology from Duke University, he completed postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of St. Andrews and Durham University. In 2022, he joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, where he is an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and director of the Social & Cognitive Origins research group.

To prove his hunch that great apes do remember individuals, Krupenye teamed up with other researchers from around the world to conduct a study with the chimpanzees and bonobos at the Edinburgh Zoo, the Planckendael Zoo in Belgium and the Kumamoto Sanctuary in Japan. ▶

“All of our research is voluntary and noninvasive,” Krupenye says. “The apes we work with live in normal social groups. When we want to do studies, the keepers call them by name into a testing area. If they want to come in, they do. And they usually do—they seem to really enjoy it.”

In this case, while the apes sipped diluted juice from a straw, Krupenye and his team tracked their eye movements as they looked at side-by-side photographs of two members of their own species—a former groupmate who had either left the zoo or died and an individual completely unknown to the ape.

“If they don’t recognize the former groupmate, they should treat them the same as the stranger, and we should see equal attention or random attention to the two pictures,” Krupenye explains. “But if they do recognize those individuals, then we expect them to spend more time looking at their former groupmates, just as you might if you passed someone you recognized on the street and did a double take.”

The researchers found the apes did indeed look significantly longer at the individuals they’d once known. And while that didn’t surprise the scientists, they were excited to find that the social memory lasted a very long time—one bonobo, 46-yearold Louise, even recognized her sister, Loretta, and her nephew, Erin, even though she hadn’t seen either of them in 26 years.

That finding represents the longest non-human social memory ever documented, which generated significant media buzz when the research was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December.

team up against a rival. These relationships matter very much, so it does make sense that they retain this type of information. But there had been almost no research on that question.”

That our closest great ape relatives, like humans, can remember individuals for long periods of time and retain information about the quality of those relationships suggests that these cognitive abilities likely evolved in our common ancestors. But Krupenye wonders just how recently, noting that dolphins have been shown to recognize the vocalizations of their podmates even after 20 years, and a study on ravens found they could retain some information about the quality of their social relationships.

“We’ve all seen those videos of a soldier coming home after a few years and their dog is just flipping out excited to see them. So the same kind of anecdotal evidence that I’ve personally experienced with apes clearly exists for other animals that are much more distantly related to us,” he says. “This type of social memory may be much more widespread across other species.”

How richly can animals understand others’ minds? Can apes or dogs take others’ perspectives? Do they know what others can see or know or believe? What information and relationships are they keeping track of?

— Christopher Krupenye ’11

“We really didn’t have any sense of how long their memories would last. It could have been that they remember for a few years, but then if they’re not likely to see the individual again, there might not be any value in retaining that memory and we might have seen a drop off,” Krupenye explains. “So we were really surprised to find they hold onto these memories for so long—potentially for their entire lives.”

The researchers were also interested to find that the apes looked longer at the individuals who were their closest social partners—the friends and relatives with whom they had positive relationships.

“This suggests that they really are distinguishing them as individuals, that they have some way of keeping track of the quality of their social relationships, even over many years,” Krupenye says.

“Apes prefer to spend time with certain individuals; they groom them to build camaraderie. Sometimes they support each other in coalitionary aggression, in which they work together to

In the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Hopkins, Krupenye has joined a team of scientists dedicated to investigating fundamental questions of behavior and the mind. Some of his colleagues are interested in the cognitive abilities of the youngest humans, while others are studying the role of perceptual experience in cognitive and neural developments or working at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. The environment has been invigorating for Krupenye, who describes his work as “inter- and extradisciplinary” at the nexus of psychology, anthropology and biology.

“Several of my colleagues are developmental psychologists who work with infants and very young children. So we spend a lot of time thinking and brainstorming ways to test the rich, complicated cognitive abilities of creatures that can’t talk,” he says.

“Broadly, my research group is interested in how humans and other animals navigate their social world. How richly can animals understand others’ minds? Can apes or dogs take others’ perspectives? Do they know what others can see or know or believe? What kinds of things do they know about other individuals in their social group, what information and relationships are they keeping track of?”

In addition to his continued work with apes in zoos and sanctuaries (he’s currently studying whether apes track the whereabouts of groupmates even when they aren’t directly perceptible to them), Krupenye’s research teams are studying adult human cognition to more precisely pin down the differences in the cognitive abilities of humans and non-human primates.

He’s also started working with man’s best friend. In 2023, Krupenye’s Social & Cognitive Origins Group established the

This type of social memory may be much more widespread across other species.

— Christopher Krupenye ’11

Canine Minds Collaborative to study dog intelligence and behavior with the help of local pet owners and their beloved pups. Interested dog owners fill out a survey, and the Collaborative then invites the dog (and owner) to the lab to participate in a series of noninvasive cognitive games and activities designed to be mentally stimulating and enjoyable while also shedding light on canine problem-solving abilities, decision-making processes, memory, attention and social behavior.

“It’s been a very exciting partnership between the university and the community, and it has provided us with a new opportunity to understand a different kind of animal mind,” Krupenye says.

“Apes are very interesting because they are our closest relatives. And all great apes are endangered, so I hope that by exposing the richness of their mental lives and how similar they are to us, people will be more motivated to care about and conserve them.

“But dogs are very cool, too, because they’re some of the only animals that really live in the human world with us, and they seem to possess a number of interesting skills for understanding human communication and human social cues.”

At Conn, Krupenye majored in biological sciences, minored in French and earned a certificate from the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment. He credits his former professors with supporting his interests and inspiring his academic and research career.

Now, he’s the professor.

At Hopkins, Krupenye teaches two undergraduate classes, including a lecture course, “Primate Minds,” that explores the evolutionary history and cognitive abilities of non-human primates, and a seminar, “Origins of the Social Mind,” which focuses on the abilities of the youngest humans and other animals to understand their social world.

“It’s a unique joy to be able to see students really light up when you’re sharing with them this whole domain of knowledge and inquiry they didn’t know existed,” Krupenye says. “For some students, this becomes a passion and an area that they want to pursue. It’s very exciting to be able to guide them and extend to them the opportunities to enter this field that I, too, am very passionate about.”

It’s not hyperbole to say it’s a dream come true for Krupenye, who first told the author of this piece that he hoped “to conduct research with apes and teach at the university level” in 2010, when he won a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship during his junior year at Conn. That was one of several scholarships, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, that supported Krupenye’s pursuit of his goals. Now, he’s working to make science more accessible to students from traditionally underrepresented groups.

“We’re really invested in doing what we can to make academia a more inclusive place for everyone,” he says. “It feels very special to be able to give back and mentor the next generation of folks who are excited to enter this field.”

Adobe Mission

San Antonio de Padua Catholic Church in Cordova, New Mexico, circa 1945

Professor Emeritus Frank Graziano is working to preserve New Mexico’s cultural heritage one historic church at a time.

BY FRANK GRAZIANO, JOHN D. MACARTHUR PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HISPANIC STUDIES

After retiring from Connecticut College in 2016 I moved to New Mexico—a spectacular setting on the Río de las Trampas, surrounded by national forest.

The house was less spectacular. For the first months I lived in a hellish, unfurnished construction site, with a mattress on the floor and contractors competing for achievement in decibels, but eventually the renovation was complete, a sense of home ensued and the silence conducive to reflection resumed. I could hear myself think.

Often that gets me into trouble. I had always been drawn to New Mexico’s adobe churches, probably as part of a broader fascination with folk art. The churches exude a mood and charm that elicits a response as much emotional as it is aesthetic. They are humble and human, unpretentious, massaged with mud into funky formal imprecision out of square and out of plumb, swelling and receding, with mass and bulk yielding somehow to grace and synesthetic softness. The churches seem to emerge from the earth like giant sculptures inherent to environs that background the composition. At isolated rural churches especially, the adobe, the landscape and the sky fuse into a single perceptual experience ratified by silence, while inside cool air contrasts with visual warmth and the enclosed silence somehow feels denser, almost tactile. And the churches stand before us as symbols: of faith, of history and heritage, of cultural identity and place attachment, but also of vulnerability, change and obsolescence.

recent projects, so I drafted a proposal along these lines, sent it to my editor at Oxford University Press and waited the requisite seemingly forever for the response. It came finally and was positive, with a contract for writing Historic Churches of New Mexico Today, and the book was eventually published in 2019.

There was significant scholarship on the churches’ history, art history and architecture, but there was nothing on what seemed most compelling: the status of the churches and their congregations presently.

I spent several months interviewing parishioners, church mayordomos (caretakers), priests, pilgrims and hermanos penitentes (members of the lay brotherhood Los Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno). It became clear rather quickly that rural churches—known here as missions—were in a precarious situation because their villages were largely depopulated, because society had become more secular, because the community culture of maintaining churches had weakened, and because the parishes and archdiocese were not in financial positions to maintain or restore churches that were rarely used. An avalanche of other factors likewise contributes to the churches’ demise: conversion to Protestant churches, selfidentifying Catholics who do not practice the faith, fragmentation of the nuclear family, functional obsolescence of the buildings, unviability of small-scale farming and consequent migration and resettlement out-of-state for employment, shortage of priests and mayordomos, and centralization of the sacraments (small local congregations gather at the mother church rather than the priest visiting each mission individually).

Shortly after settling in New Mexico I began to research the possibility of writing a book on historic churches. I discovered quickly that there was significant (and redundant) scholarship on the churches’ history, art history and architecture, but there was nothing on what seemed most compelling: the status of the churches and their congregations presently, given the apparent disuse and need for restoration. A hybrid method at the nexus of history and ethnography had been my approach in other

In my view historic churches are worth saving even if they are never used, and even if their communities are completely depopulated, because they are cultural patrimony. Their value accrues over time. To give an extreme analogy, a broken pottery vessel tossed into the junkpile by an ancient native culture becomes—centuries later—a treasure displayed in a museum. A disused church is denigrated as outdated and obsolete, but these qualities may as well be its virtues. The restoration of church buildings also preserves the intangible aspects of heritage: cultural antecedents, historical memory and a quiet folk architectural

aesthetic integral to place-based identity. A village-scape with a ruin or a void in place of a church emits a message of desolation, of cultural collapse.

Nuevo México Profundo, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to heritage preservation, evolved from such thoughts. After completing the book I wondered if there was a way to give something back, to not only fundraise for the preservation of the churches but also to diversify their uses, to make them essential as a religious cultural asset and to make them accessible for visits. The statewide relationships I had established during the book research made the idea seem feasible.

But it was also clear to me that years would pass before a new organization could gain sufficient credibility to be effective. The project needed an institutional base, and in view of that, with help from friends, we first envisioned Profundo as an autonomous operation in partnership with existing cultural organizations. Profundo thus began as a collaboration of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, the New Mexico State Historian, the State Historic Preservation Officer, Cornerstones Community Partnerships, the Spanish Colonial Arts Society and the New Mexico Heritage Preservation Alliance. We received 501(c)(3) status in 2022 and subsequently have continued operations independently. Profundo is an all-volunteer organization with a staff of one (me) and a small, dynamic board. In 2023 we received a Heritage

Preservation Award from the state of New Mexico, which contributed significantly to accelerated growth.

Among Profundo’s earliest events were concerts, one classical at the incomparable Santuario de Chimayó and another, of traditional New Mexican folk music, at San Rafael in the tiny Mora County village of La Cueva, by candlelight. Shortly after, thanks to the Thaw Charitable Trust, we restored our first church, San Agustín, which is in a depopulated village in the impossibly scenic Gallinas River Valley.

Tours were introduced to provide access to cultural sites that are difficult to visit on one’s own. We gradually expanded our exclusive focus on churches to include cultural heritage experiences more broadly conceived. Recent tours have visited the ruins, mission and petroglyphs at Zuni Pueblo; churches along the Pecos River, featuring the colcha embroidery panels at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Villanueva; a sheepherder’s home, a church and a trading post on the Navajo Reservation; several village missions; and Acoma Pueblo’s San Esteban del Rey on Christmas Eve. The 2024 season includes a petroglyph site and nearby churches at Ohkay Owingeh; the exceptional missions on the High Road to Taos; a Benedictine monastery, the Catwalk Recreation Area and a ghost town near Silver City; a private chapel and historic churches in Cieneguilla, Galisteo, Cerrillos and Golden; a coming-of-age ceremony on the Mescalero

St. Augustine Church, Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico

Frank Graziano

Apache reservation; San Francisco de Asís and its missions around Ranchos de Taos; and Laguna Pueblo’s St. Joseph— built around 1699—and nearby missions designed by John Gaw Meem. The demand for the tours is extraordinary and they generally sell out in a day, often in an hour.

When tours were suspended due to the COVID pandemic I scrambled for an option more meaningful and enduring than Zoom presentations and landed finally on the idea of documenting heritage by interviewing 100 New Mexicans. The participants came from many walks of life: traditional artists and artisans, a sheriff, a senator, educators, undocumented immigrants, Franciscans, writers, hippies, restaurateurs, a craft brewer, mayordomos and musicians, among many others. The result was the Profundo Heritage Archive, housed at the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research and online at its digital repository.

Restoration projects have become more prevalent as our fundraising abilities have improved. Profundo initiated and funded the conservation of historic santero altar screens and painted wooden statues at San Antonio in Córdova and at one of

the most historically important missions in New Mexico, San José de Gracia in Las Trampas. At that same church we are currently engaged in a comprehensive restoration of the building, including adobe remudding of the exterior, stabilization of the parapets, replacement of the canales that drain the roof, rebuilding of the windows and preservation of the exterior woodwork. Presently we are also collaborating with San Pedro in Chamita on the conservation of a Pedro Antonio Fresquís altar screen, with San Francisco de Asís in Golden on building restoration, and with St. Augustine at Isleta Pueblo on the conservation of a late 14thcentury Spanish painting known now as The Christ of Isleta. These efforts are a mere scratching of the surface compared to the need for restoration statewide, but we persevere with our limited resources to do what we can. Our initiatives have also contributed to a growing collective mood of collaboration and motivation among like-minded people and organizations, so perhaps there is a compounding effect as discrete efforts become mutually inspiring. New Mexico’s unofficial state slogan, carpe mañana (seize tomorrow), could as well be carpe ayer (seize yesterday).

Above: San Francisco de Asís Church, Golden, New Mexico. Next page: A 19th-century bulto (saint statue) at San José de Gracia Church in Las Trampas, New Mexico

Frank

Graziano

A disused church is denigrated as outdated and obsolete, but these qualities may as well be its virtues.

Frank Graziano

I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT MY RADIO

Appealing to eclectic music lovers everywhere, WCNI thrives even in the era of Big Streaming.

BY TIM STEVENS ’03

Navigating the studio home of WCNI, Connecticut College’s independent, ad-free, freeform radio station, can be challenging for those with a touch of claustrophobia. Most walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with shelves of CDs and vinyl. Eagle eyes might even spot the occasional tape or 8-track, still holding on years after their format essentially went the way of the dodo. On the walls without music, posters, stickers and old concert announcements hint at eras past and the station’s rich history.

Make it through WCNI’s labyrinthian hallway and things open up to the station’s beating heart, its broadcast booth. There, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, it broadcasts an impressively wide array of music to Camels—and the Camel-curious—everywhere. If one stops by, they might well catch John Tyler, the station’s community general manager, commanding the airwaves with his Friday morning world music show, aptly titled John E’s World. Tuning the dial to 90.9 every other Saturday after 9 p.m. will gain you access to Joey Royale’s Crypt of Cool, a show he bills as “weird music for weird people.” And on Mondays, anchoring the 3-6 afternoon slot, Student General Manager Riley Madden ’26 will greet you with an “eclectic mix of rock, folk and Americana.” ►

Photos by Sean D. Elliot

RADIO ON: WCNI Student General Manager Riley Madden ‘26 helms the broadcast booth during her weekly show Pirate Radio, which features an eclectic mix of rock, folk and Americana.

The Pirate Radio name is a tribute to what WCNI is all about—ordinary people volunteering their time to play their favorite music for their community, no matter what genre, no matter how commercial or how obscure.

— Riley Madden ’26, WC ni

Student Gene R al Mana G e R

Madden works the board with an assuredness one would not expect from someone who’s only been doing this for just over a year. She makes sure her listeners know exactly who they’re hearing before moving easily from the likes of Talk to Me by Bruce Springsteen—The Boss is a staple of every broadcast—to All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints by Paul Simon. At times, she builds thematic suites within her three hours; at others, she lets a sort of controlled anarchy guide her selections. In addition to the music, she peppers her on-air time with trivia and song analysis.

“I start off every show with the same song, Pirate Radio, a rocker from the lesser-known folk rock musician John Hiatt. His song, a tribute to the old tradition of pirate radio blasted haphazardly over the airwaves, playing the unconventional, innovative songs commercial radio wouldn’t play, is also the name of my show,” Madden explains.

“The Pirate Radio name is a tribute to what WCNI is all about—ordinary people volunteering their time to play their favorite music for their community, no matter what genre, no matter how commercial or how obscure.”

LET MY LOVE OPEN THE DOOR

In 1951, when Connecticut College for Women got its first taste of college radio at 620 on the AM dial, Madden’s show would have seemed impossible to station founders Carol Crane ’50 and Phyll Hoffman ’51. In fact, there’s almost nothing recognizable about the noncommercial, educational station compared to its infancy.

Cables carried the early signal from Palmer Auditorium to the dorms and academic buildings. However, residents down the hill in New London couldn’t hear a word of it. If someone wasn’t on campus, and inside, they’d be out of luck.

Sitting next to the transmitter in Plant was no guarantee, either. Even on campus, there was a good chance the signal from a more powerful station would create enough interference that WNCI barely broke through. Still, for 45 minutes on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings, Conn students had an opportunity to hear their classmates in the Radio Club broadcast.

The fledgling station took a big leap forward in 1974. That’s when it made the move to the FM dial, extending the station’s reach and expanding broadcasts to every day of the week. But with only a 10-watt antenna to carry the signal, WCNI remained a largely campus-only station.

It was in 1984 that the station really began to come into its own. Under the direction of the station’s then-President Rebecca Gates ’86, WCNI made three critical changes. First, it upgraded to a 500-watt antenna, increasing the station’s reach to around 25 miles into towns like Colchester and Essex and across the border into Rhode Island. Second, the station began to actively broadcast late-night programming. (According to WCNI Treasurer and DJ James Sachs ’85, the midnight-3 a.m. slot is now one of the most popular for students to claim.)

Third, and arguably most important to the station’s identity, it began to open up its schedule to professors and community members to come aboard and broadcast their own radio shows, too. Besides bringing a more comprehensive range of voices and interests to the airwaves, it also helped weave WCNI into the larger fabric of the New London area. For a campus that has long wanted to connect more deeply with the people and communities surrounding it, WCNI stands as an early and ongoing success.

In the years since, the connection between the radio station and the community has been further solidified by concerts, an annual fundraising marathon, another antenna upgrade that quadrupled the station’s wattage in 2003 and the establishment of Connecticut College Community Radio, Inc., as the body overseeing WCNI’s operations and finances in 2005.

But the “little station that could” has seen its fair share of challenges, too.

JOIN THE GANG

As it turns out, it wasn’t video but COVID-19 that nearly killed the radio star. In March 2020, Conn students left for spring break and were promptly asked not to return to campus and instead finish their courses online. Staff and faculty, too, were asked to work from home if possible, and WCNI went automated.

Live broadcasts finally returned in June 2021. But even then, restrictions and campus outbreaks limited student involvement.

“The College was very protective of students, and student DJs were just not allowed,” Madden says.

But by the time Madden arrived as a first-year student in the fall of 2022, life on campus was beginning to get back to normal.

“My first week or two at Conn, I saw the WCNI table. As someone who loves music and loves talking about music, I was really drawn to it. I started training in September and I was on in October,” she says.

“I was really enjoying it. Then, in February, there was an email about a new Board election for student manager, which had been vacant for years. I thought it was a fantastic opportunity, but I was just a freshman. I had to ask for a waiver to even run. But I did, and they gave it to me.”

Eventually, more students joined or rejoined the community hosts on the WCNI airwaves. The presence of new blood in the studio has also brought a further diversity of sound, something the station has always prided itself on in the modern era.

“There’s an incredible diversity of genres offered,” asserts Sachs. “There is a show on movie soundtracks. There was a program in Yiddish.”

Madden agrees, noting that while many stations play the same 50 or so songs on repeat, “We have everything. Classical. Traditional folk. Sea shanties. Broadway standards. Rock and roll, obviously. Oldies. Jazz. Everyone involved is passionate about music and what they’re playing.”

MODERN STATE OF MIND

As WCNI has evolved, so too has the radio industry. Major disruptions have included the rise of syndicated corporate radio and online music streaming companies like Spotify and Tidal.

50 YEARS OF

CONNECTICUT COLLEGE

will mark 50 years of FM broadcasts with a WCNI anniversary celebration during Fall Weekend, Oct. 18-20, 2024.

Alumni of the radio station who want to participate should contact event co-chairs Jamie Sachs ’85 (wcni. treas@gmail.com), Richard Kadzis ’76 (rkadzis@gmail.com) or Ken Abel ’76 (kenn616@gmail.com).

“There’s this challenge to making an FM station relevant today,” Sachs admits. But he says WCNI offers the human touch, listener-focused experience and wide variety largely missing from Big Streaming.

“When people use Spotify or YouTube premium or any of those systems, they’re all algorithm-generated. When they build your playlist, they pick the songs that are not only popular but that will make them the most money to play. So when you’re using Spotify, you’re the product. Even if it’s the free version, you’re the product. The WCNI listener is not a product or service—they’re actually a listener,” he says.

“And we’re humans picking music from this vast library we’ve developed over the decades. So, yes, anyone can build a playlist, but you can’t duplicate someone going into that library, pulling things, mixing them with their digital collections and offering new selections every show.”

That doesn’t mean WCNI isn’t growing and adapting to the times in its own way. Already boasting the third largest signal reach among Connecticut’s 11 college stations, placing it ahead

of Yale’s frequently praised WNHU and NESCAC rival Trinity’s WRTC, WCNI is poised to mount a new antenna on top of Shain Library later this year. (Paid for largely by donations raised during the station’s annual fundraising marathon, the antenna marks a bit of a full circle—during the ’70s, a windmill mounted on the original Shain roof powered the station for a time.)

The new antenna will provide listeners with better and more consistent reception of the independent oasis that is WCNI on the radio dial. But the station also streams online, allowing users to listen in from anywhere in the world.

“During the last fundraising marathon, we got calls from all over —L.A. and New York, but also Japan and Brazil,” Madden says.

In recognition of its historic and ongoing contributions to music broadcasting, WCNI was selected this spring as a 2024 inductee to the New England Music Hall of Fame. Madden says it’s a fitting tribute for the resilient station with the simple motto: “For the love of music.”

“There just aren’t many stations, even college stations, that are entirely independent and free-form and connect with the community,” Madden says. “But if you’re looking for music you won’t hear on other stations, WCNI is the place.”

Class Notes

The cast of the Connecticut College Theater Department production of Urinetown performs on tech week opening night in March at The Athey Center at Palmer Auditorium. The play was directed by Tess Cruz ’16.

coverage.

CC Magazine welcomes your Class Notes and submissions. Please contact your class correspondent, email notes to classnotes@conncoll.edu or submit Class Notes online at: conncoll.edu/news/cc-magazine

denotes a Reunion class year. The next Reunion is May 30-June 1, 2025.

Correspondent: Mona Gustafson Affinito, forgivenessoptions@earthlink.net, 723 Water Street, Apt. 1001, Excelsior, MN, 55331, 612-760-5007 Phyllis Hoffman Driscoll wrote that it was unusually cold and windy this winter in Hilton Head, S.C. Too cold to walk in the morning at 7:15 with her neighbor (her “adopted daughter”). Phyllis calls her that because her neighbor is younger than Phyllis’ own daughter, but she likes to get out early too so that they can walk on the fairways. Elizabeth Ann Hotz Kaiser’s husband, Rick, took the time to write a warm letter telling us that Elizabeth is “still alive and doing well at 93.” She was married to her first husband, Bill Waterhouse, from 1951 to 1982. They had three children, all now retired. She married Rick in 1987, and they live in Bellingham, Wash. Over the years, she has been active in scuba diving, international travel, the arts and volunteering in the community. She’s held many jobs, including manufacturing scuba diving suits, managing the office at a cabinet shop, working in a cookware store, pressing “ocean botanicals” into framed prints and selling them at craft fairs, and finally, working as the executive secretary to the director of the Mount Baker Theatre. She has been on many boards in the community, including the local aquarium, the museum of art and history, and the theater. “She has always had a passion for food and cooking, art, literature, and Arctic travel, venturing north of the Arctic Circle on many occasions to watch the polar bears and Arctic foxes.” She lives at home, in the care of her husband, and enjoys her later years looking out over Puget Sound and the slate-gray skies of Bellingham. Helen Johnson Haberstroh is still playing with art but, she writes, “at a lowered pace, with just the annual Christmas card and maintaining my ‘Prints with Tints’ Etsy shop.” Helen joined the hearing-aid club and “was startled to hear my knees cracking every time I escaped the recliner. The stove timer also has a weird new high pitch to alert me that dinner is ready.” [Note from Mona: I googled “Helen Haberstroh/houses/watercolors” and found some really interesting, lovely and exciting details about her work. I suggest you try it.] Helen reported that Margorie Erickson Albertson, her juniorand senior-year roomie, keeps her informed with an occasional phone call about our dwindling roster of classmates. “She also sends photos from our wild years when she tackles another shoebox of memorabilia. Humbling that we were so gorgeous back then! She still plays bridge with her buddies,

as do I, to while away a delightful afternoon with friends.” Nancy Bath Roof is happy to see that we ’51ers are still in the news and wonders how many of us are left. “My own journey has been one of service involved with trying to bring higher values into global structures at the UN and global citizenship.” Nancy spoke at many UN conferences, as well as at Gorbachev’s World Political Forum, and cofounded the Values Caucus at the UN, along with the Spiritual Caucus. She also received a grant from USAID to work with refugees in the former Yugoslavia. “In early 2000 I founded Kosmos Journal of Transformation, recognizing the need for structural change worldwide in all our institutions (kosmosjournal.org).” In a consulting role now, Nancy spends most of her time in contemplation and learning about various approaches to reality through traditional religions and new spiritual approaches. “So I have been busy.” She received a Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology many years ago and is much involved in that movement. “Looking forward to hearing more from those of us still here doing our best to make a better world.” Joan Andrew White let us know that Lauralee Lutz died on May 25, 2023, reporting that she and Lauralee had kept in touch. “Lauralee was medically inclined, worked for MDs and was friendly with them. Great sense of humor.” Joan never saw her after college, but they talked on the phone. Another sad note: When Bob MacGregor’s big heart gave up on Jan. 2, Harriet Bassett MacGregor lost her husband of almost 72 years (and I lost a dear and special friend). Mona Gustafson Affinito enjoyed a happy Christmas celebration with her family in Williamsburg, Va., amazed to be celebrating her 95th such event (“though I don’t remember much about my first Christmas, given that I was only two months old”). She is on her umpteenth revision of the first draft of a manuscript tentatively titled On My Way Out: My Life with Psi. A few people have liked it well enough to critique it before she begins her search for an agent/publisher. As for travel, she expects to cruise down the Great Lakes on Viking Cruise Lines in August with son Doug, looking forward to ending close to home, in Duluth, Minn. She thinks she’s sated with across-the-seas journeys. And a final note: Mona is seeking any help she can get to identify which class members are still alive, maybe starting with a search through Koiné. 54

Still here doing our best to make a better world.

— NANCY BATH ROOF ’51

few of you. Klumpie’s family spent most of March in Tucson, Ariz. Since COVID she has hosted a weekly luncheon with friends, setting the table for 12. Ann Matthews Kent stays busy in her cottage in a retirement community. She gave up tennis but plays water volleyball three times a week. She is in a book club and a photo club. Ann founded and still runs a birding program that reports to Cornell the tree swallow and bluebird population in her community. She is friends with Dorothy Knup Harper’s family, as Dorie’s brother lives in Ann’s community; Dorie used to visit there before her death. Ann welcomed her third great-grandchild. Irene Ball Barrack P’81 ’85 GP’18 may be the baby of the class; on Jan. 2, she had a wonderful 90th birthday party. Both her children graduated from CC, as did two granddaughters, Alexandra ’18 and Jennie ’18. She has two great-grandchildren, a 3-year-old girl and a new baby boy, the family’s fifth generation named William Barrack. In the early fall, Irene travels to her cottage on Martha’s Vineyard to enjoy the lovely season. I visited Kathryn Hull Easton and Peter in Naples, and we dined with Janice Smith Post. We are still dear friends and I love being with them. Jan is now in Naples year-round; her daughter and husband have also moved there. Kathy and Pete go to their home in Virginia Beach each summer; they have a daughter and grandson in Naples and a son and family in Virginia Beach. I spoke with a son of Linda Makela Mulford; after CC she got her master’s degree at University of Bridgeport. She raised her family in Shelton, Conn. She was very active in the community, especially in her church, and as a history buff, she loved working with the Historical Society. She is still in her home and now in the loving care of two sons. I said hello to her briefly and was grateful I could give her the warm wishes of her classmates. Ann Heagney Weimer is in an assisted-living facility near her former home on Cape Cod. Her children are in the area and are in and out all the time, as they were when she was in her house. She has nine grandchildren; eight are in the Boston area, so she feels very lucky. Ann frequently talks with Jane Daly Crowley and with Norma Hamady Richards. Jane still lives in her home and drives locally. She has recovered

Correspondents: Joanne Williams Hartley, jodihartley69@icloud.com, 69 Chesterton Road, Wellesley MA 02481, 617-620-9385, and Sally Ashkins Churchill, sachurchill@comcast.net 70th Reunion! It’s an auspicious event … CC was such a remarkable chapter of the many in our long lives. Some members of the Classes of ’34 and ’35 attended our 65th; I believe one was aged 100 and one was 101. Louise Klump Tanner was there with me, and she plans to attend our 70th with her daughter, Katie; I hope to be there with my daughter, Margot Rigard MacArthur ’87 … and we hope to see a

Irene Barrack ’54 with her grandson, Wilkie Barrack, and her great-granddaughter, Reilly, at Irene’s 90th birthday party

2024 ALUMNI AWARDS

THE UNITY AWARD - NEW IN 2024

The Unity Award, given at Celebrations Reunions, recognizes individuals who have gone above and beyond in their contributions toward promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in their personal and professional lives.

ALUMNI TRIBUTE AWARD

The Alumni Tribute Award honors an alumna or alumnus who has provided sustained and extraordinary service to the College.

THE GOSS AWARD

This award is given annually to a member(s) of the Alumni Association who through his or her enthusiastic participation in the area of Association programs or activities has made a significant contribution to the Connecticut College community. The award is given at the discretion of the President of the Alumni Association.

THE MACH AROM ’89 AWARD

This award honors alumni for service to Connecticut College and for distinguished achievements in his or her professional field or within society. Any member of a class that graduated within the past 15 years is eligible to be nominated.

HARRIET BUESCHER LAWRENCE ’34 PRIZE

This prize recognizes outstanding contributions to society by any member of the College community. The candidate’s life achievements will have equaled or surpassed those of other leaders in his or her field and should reflect the values instilled in graduates of Connecticut College.

AGNES BERKELEY LEAHY AWARD

This award honors alumni who have contributed outstanding service, demonstrated by continued interest in the Alumni Association, and sustained active participation in class, club or Board of Directors activities.

During Reunion Weekend each year, the College celebrates exceptional alumni. Below, this year’s award winners share favorite memories and what Conn means to them.

Mach Arom ’89 Award

Gabriella Araya ’19

Social Work Case Manager, Mount Sinai Hospital

As an undergraduate, Gabriella was involved in everything from youth mentorship to the women’s rugby team to the Women’s Empowerment Initiative. That willingness to share and give back carries on in her career with Americorps VISTA and as a social worker at the Mount Sinai World Trade Center Health Program. Her work aiding 9/11 first responders and survivors in accessing mental health care services has had a genuine impact on their lives. Gabriella is compassionate and genuine in all her endeavors.

Ann has been recognized by top critics for several of her recent works. Her novel Hello Beautiful was an instant New York Times bestseller and the 100th Oprah Book Club pick. Dear Edward, another New York Times bestseller, was adapted for the screen on Apple TV+.

Conn’s lasting impression:

Professor Blanche Boyd was a seminal figure in my becoming a writer. I took classes in English Literature—a Henry James seminar and a Finnegan’s Wake seminar in particular—that had a huge impact on me.

Harriet Buescher

Lawrence ’34 Prize

David Grann ’89 Author

My thoughts on being a Camel: Immersing myself in community engagement and advocacy at Conn led me to become a licensed social worker with a passion for social justice.

Agnes Berkeley Leahy Award

Jamie Glanton

Costello ’89

Associate Vice President and Dean of Students, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Jamie is passionate about all things Conn and has a longstanding commitment to volunteerism. Jamie has helped shape our community as a mentor, a fundraiser, and a Trustee. She also served on the Alumni Association Board of Directors, breaking boundaries as the first person of color to serve as president. She continues to be a beacon of encouragement and knowledge for our alumni community.

When I think about Conn: It’s not a memory, it is a feeling—a sense of belonging and friendship. The Class of 1989 is a wonderfully unique group that has supported one another over the years and I am blessed to be a part of the magic.

Harriet Buescher

Lawrence ’34 Prize

Ann Napolitano ’94

Author

The Alumni Tribute Award

Warren Erickson ’74

Retired VP of Human Resources, MassMutual Financial Group

Warren’s commitment to Conn is unwavering. He has served in many noteworthy ways including the Board of Trustees, Rosemary Park Society, Class Gift Officer, Alumni Association Board of Directors, and most recently, on his 50th Reunion Committee as Class Gift Chair. Warren inspires others to give back — his joy and enthusiasm are contagious.

David is a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author and staff writer at The New Yorker. His novels continue to enthrall readers and his writing tackles intimidating, complex topics. Additionally, David is a frequent speaker who has given talks about everything from the importance of historical memory to the dangers of complicity in unjust systems to the art of writing.

How my Conn experience shaped me: The broad liberal arts education made me endlessly curious about the world and laid the foundation for me to be a writer.

The Goss Award

Saveena Dhall ’94

Saveena Dhall Coaching and Consulting

Saveena is a passionate and committed volunteer at Connecticut College, currently serving as an Alumni Association Board of Directors Vice President. She has served on numerous committees including the Unity and Engagement Committees. With her commitment to DEI-minded work, she has helped our community flourish.

Looking back at my time at Conn: I found my voice here. There were so many incredible, powerful women of color—juniors and seniors—who mentored me and widened their circle to include me. I learned so much from them, as well as from my professors and the staff who gave their gifts to the Conn community.

Lasting legacy: My fondest memories are singing with Gamut, the College’s first coed a cappella group; taking religion courses with Professor Garrett Green; and serving as a Housefellow in Lambdin House. Conn helped build my selfconfidence. I was a scholarship student at Conn; without the financial aid I received, I would not have been able to attend. I will never feel as if I’ve repaid the College for all it gave me.

Unity

Award

Annie Scott ’84

Director of Information Technology, CT State Community College Middlesex

Annie is a champion for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Her commitment to supporting alumni and students of color is laudable. Annie has served Conn in many capacities including the Board of Trustees, Presidents Council on Equity and Inclusion, HERD Mentorship program, Reunion Committee, Class Gift Officer, Alumni Association Board of Directors, and most recently, as the Chair of the 50th Anniversary of Unity Committee.

Why give back?

At Conn, I felt the initiative and inspiration to speak my truth and to advocate not only for myself but for those who were less able. I felt comfortable at any table. I want everyone to have the experience that I did—the FEELINGS of belonging, being welcome, being heard, being seen, being valued and being an integral part of the herd!

fully from a serious case of COVID and has the support of two nearby daughters. Nancy Blau Lasser and John are doing well; they are still in a high-rise condominium in New Jersey that has lovely views of NYC. They were married right after college and will celebrate their 70th anniversary in August. John still drives locally; they enjoy getting out. Nancy loves her book club and plays mah-jongg weekly. They have two daughters, one in Chappaqua, N.Y., and one in Pennsylvania, and are blessed with four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. The most recent Class Notes omitted the fact that Catherine Pappas McNamara’s son Bill predeceased his father last year, prior to her move to assisted living, and I know the Class of ’54 joins me in sending deepest condolences to her. We lost two classmates: Polly Maddox Harlow on May 2, 2022, and Mildred (M’lee) Catledge Sampson on Nov. 2, 2023. We have wonderful memories of them and send our deepest sympathy to their families.

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Correspondent: Elaine Diamond Berman, 100 Riverside Blvd., Apt. 20C, New York, NY 10069, elainedberman@comcast.net Elaine Diamond Berman writes, “One of my great pleasures as a member of the Class of ’57 is the Zoom meetings to which we are all invited. I am no computer nerd, but following Suzanne Krim Greene’s instructions to join class Zooms is extremely easy. Classmates tell us about their pursuits, and we are planning future book reviews. Please join us. It will get you thinking about how much we enjoyed our class and our college days.”

Sally Hargrove Harris P’77 lives in Wethersfield, Vt., close to the Connecticut River. When I spoke with her in February, she had lost her husband, Chris, two weeks before. Chris was a gifted book designer, and he and Sally both did graphic design. Sally still does graphics and a newsletter for Wethersfield, and she is a talented singer. She sings alto with a local hospice singing group. She loves her community and has found great support from her neighbors. Monica Hyde Peyton has lived in the same house in Englewood, N.J., she bought with husband Scott the year after they were married. Scott, who taught ESL, passed away a few years ago. Monica’s daughter, Courtney, lives in Edinburgh and has worked in water purification and conservation for many years. Courtney also runs a B&B. Monica’s son, Justin, has worked in hospitality. Monica spent her early years working at Doubleday; she retired from a job at a catering company some years ago. The Peytons used to enjoy traveling to new places in Europe and Asia. Anne (Margot) Cross Allen lost her husband, Robert, last March. After living in Pleasantville, N.Y., they moved to a home built in the 1790s in Malden Bridge, N.Y. Margot has enjoyed a book club, a garden club and a hunt club. She walked the hunt club’s beagles twice a week. Margot has three children and three grandchildren. One son and a daughter live within driving distance, and they visit her frequently. Another son and his wife, both physicians, live in Chicago. Margot has put her house on the market and plans to move into a senior residence when it sells. Dolores Pagani Tutt has been involved with the Boy Scouts for more than 30 years. With four sons and now a local grandson, she stayed on with the Scouts. Dolores lives in Hurley, N.Y.,

which is south of Albany and north of Poughkeepsie. She and husband Bob moved there when Bob worked for IBM. She remains involved with her local church, working in religious education for more than 20 years. Dolores also stays busy with Recipe for Reading, volunteering to help first graders learn to read. Azalea (Susie) McDowell Leckszas still lives in the home along the South River outside of Annapolis, Md., where five generations of her family have lived. She and husband Manfred brought up their three children to serve and contribute to society. Azalea said they all have learned that lesson.

Correspondent: Millie Price Nygren, m.nygren@att.net, 1048 Bedford St., Fremont, CA 94539, 408-464-2907 Elizabeth Froment Brown leads a simple life, happy and healthy, alternating residence between her New Jersey home and a lake-community summer home in Pennsylvania. She feels fortunate to participate in many activities in both places. She has been a widow for several years but sees her children and grandkids often. Not a big traveler but still lives independently. Jean Curtiss Britt enjoyed a visit from Millie Price Nygren, who was in the Chicago suburbs with her son for a family funeral. “Millie and I both graduated from the all-girl’s Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, along with our time together at Conn, so we had a lot to catch up on. We were grateful to be among few friends who can trace their friendship back to our teen years!” Cynthia Enloe and Anne Sweazey had dinner together in the Upper West Side, N.Y., in early November. “The highlight was Anne’s bringing to dinner a copy of our Shwiffs record! Circa 1958?? I was in NYC to give a lecture at Brooklyn College about my just-published book: Twelve Feminist Lessons of War. Anne and I had a jolly catch-up!” Adele Merrill Welch reports that climate change has hit the MidCoast of Maine. “Two significant storms this winter damaged the waterfront. Docks and piers were ripped from their pilings and floated off to sea. The ocean flooded our roads. It all had quite an impact.” Her property was protected, so she didn’t have any damage. “Anyone who questions climate change and sea-level rise does not have their eyes open. We all need to adapt.” Gareth Griffiths lives in Scotia, N.Y., across the Mohawk River from Schenectady. She plays the piano: chamber music and discovering works by Beach, Chaminade, and other trailblazing female

composers. She is also the permanent sub at a local church and coordinates two concert series at the Schenectady Library. In warm weather, she paddles her Hornbeck canoe all over and works every day in the garden. Her motto is “Just keep moving!” For Harriet Kaufman Brislow, life seems full of challenges. Her husband had difficult surgery last year, with a long recovery; he’s beginning to have uncomfortable symptoms again, “so that is a concern.” Harriet’s been diagnosed with breast cancer, but it’s very small and contained, so she’s not too worried about getting it taken care of. “I’m still working and playing tennis and hope to go skiing before my surgery—if the surgeon will allow it and my husband is OK.”

Correspondent: Bonnie Campbell Billings-Wauters, bsq22@aol.com, 1348 Winding Oaks Circle W, Vero Beach, FL 32963, 802-734-1876 In September, Camels Lonnie Jones Schorer and Jean Lewis Maloy ’83 met on the Camino de Santiago while hiking through spectacular landscapes and along the sea from Portugal to the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, in Spain. Milbrey Wallin McLaughlin’s granddaughter Emily is turning 16. She’s a delight—and taller than Milbrey! Son Ben and family live in Humboldt County, Calif. … lawyers, lawyers. She would love to see any ’63 classmate who is in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Would be such fun to revisit adventures, misadventures and post-CC life.” Linda Osborne writes from Santa Fe, N.M., where she has lived for over 20 years, moving there after 35 years in San Francisco. “Still enjoying life in the ‘City Different,’ while popping up to San Francisco occasionally to check in with old friends, as well as taking occasional trips back East.” She’s involved with Literacy Volunteers, tutoring ESL to adults, and she’s on the board of a local animal shelter, Espanola Humane Shelter. So far she’s resisted moving into one of the town’s residence homes and, dealing with advanced age-related macular degeneration, has had to arrange for drivers and whatnot. “Since I live near the historic Plaza and many local watering holes, my friends don’t seem to mind picking me up.” Ruth Roney

Cynthia Enlo ’60 and Anne Sweazey ’60 had dinner together in New York’s Upper West Side in early November.

In September, Camels Lonnie Jones Schorer ’63 and Jean Lewis Maloy ’83 went hiking through spectacular landscapes from Portugal to the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Spain.

McMullin and husband Tom are still in Savannah, Ga., enjoying everything. They have a view of the river and the ocean and miles of salt marshes. They explore by boat often, and they both play tennis. Tom’s Alzheimer’s is progressing, but slowly. He remembers almost nothing (except music and poetry) but has a fabulous sense of humor, and enjoys everything they do. Ruth is chair of the Yale School of Management 45th reunion this year and is busy with local volunteer activities. Her favorite is the University of Georgia’s Marine Science Center and Aquarium, where she can share her love of the local environment, ecology, history, and flora and fauna. A short drive off I-95, they welcome guests. Judith Long still lives in her historic cottage in Sag Harbor, N.Y. She gets into NYC often to visit daughter Abby, whose restaurant on the Lower East Side—Betty—is going great guns. Judy enjoys writing her “memoirs,” using Storyworth, an email service. In a year she’ll have a hardcover book of her writings and photos. Sara Manwell Bradford retired and closed her architectural landscape practice. “I’m not sure what should happen next, but there are plenty of household and gardening projects. New London isn’t all that far, but I rarely get back. The Arboretum has particularly meaningful memories and I am glad to be able to contribute with a Stewardship Fund.”

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Correspondent: Platt Townend Arnold, platt_arnold@yahoo.com Patricia Edwards Anderson writes that at 81, she’s grudgingly showing signs of old age: She’s lost two inches and put on weight. Despite laser surgery, she wears glasses again, and spotty memory often confuses her and others. “Quit smoking

too late to avoid emphysema, but quit drinking in time to enjoy family and friends!” Her three children and four grandchildren are close, and their gatherings are frequent and entertaining. Pat meets weekly with Hope Batchelder-Stevens and Platt Townend Arnold for bridge. They mourn the passing of dear Darcy Miller Austin in January. Joe and Pat play bridge online with longtime friends from their Coast Guard days. They’re active in church activities … cramming for the final exam? They enjoy river and ocean cruises, spend time in Florida most winters, and keep in touch with many of their former CGA sponsor-cadets, now mostly retired with guest rooms coast to coast. She’s grateful beyond words for it all. “Remember to vote in November.” Wendy Lehman Lash is delighted to say that after 57 years she and Stephen are still married to each other. They met while she was at CC. He is chairman emeritus at Christie’s, still working and loving it. Daughter Abigail is a top real estate broker

at Brown Harris Stevens in NYC; her husband is head of Fiduciary Trust Company and commutes to Boston. Their wonderful daughters are growing up too fast: Hattie is a freshman at Williams College, and Lucy is a junior at the Nightingale Bamford School, in NYC. She and Wendy toured CC last summer. Wendy’s son, William, and his wife, Jaime, are moving to Charlotte, N.C. Wendy and Stephen enjoy NYC and Stonington, Conn., with their three adorable, badly behaved Jack Russell terriers. Marie Birnbaum and husband Stephan Vahl are still on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. “I enjoy opportunities at the nearby Folger Library and Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress.” Susan Epstein Messitte and Marie are longtime subscribers to the series at the downtown Shakespeare Theatre. Marie’s daughter and husband, in Texas, have two toddler girls. “It was wonderful to see them last summer as the girls turned 3 and 1, and again at Christmas.” Marie looks forward to Reunion and hopes many will attend. Ann Staples Dixon is doing well except for vision problems. She’s still working (though not as hard) because she loves helping people take trips. She’s grateful for family and friends to keep her busy, and she plans to attend our 60th followed by a family trip to South Africa. Bobbie Whitman Dahl’s grandson was admitted to CC; she is delighted and trusts she will be visiting campus more regularly. She won’t make Reunion due to her grandson’s high school graduation in Phoenix and will miss reconnecting: “I know it will be very special to all who attend.” Ellen Corroon Petersen has become an art tourist, visiting the Venice Biennale in ’22 and the Glenstone Museum, in Maryland, in October, as well as museums and galleries in NYC and beyond. “Mexico

Ellen Corroon Petersen ’64 in front of a marvelous Diego Rivera mural in Mexico City

City is a terrific art destination.” Hope Batchelder-Stevens is happy to be out of the COVID panic, though she admits she settled in and read a lot. She keeps up with friends from throughout her adulthood; her move back to Connecticut lets her see Platt Townend Arnold and Pat Edwards Anderson! She wants to get involved with the environment and the election. “Devoted to my children and two English-American grandsons (12 and 6)—wonderfully interesting. The older one is addicted to his tablet, to learning and to his friends. The younger one may be the most active and social person I know, devoted to ‘football’ and always running.” Hope looks forward to catching up at Reunion. Sheila Raymond Hazen sends greetings from Charlottesville, Va., where she has lived since 1968, except for one year in Canada. Sadly, her husband, Stan, died in March, at 93. “He lived a long, full life as long as he could.” In addition to the emotional impact of his death, Sheila has been dealing with legal and financial issues, with the help of Stan’s son, as well as ongoing health problems. While still in the house she and Stan bought after their marriage in 1997, she is considering an eventual move to a local retirement community. One at the top of her list is home to several CC alums: “They have dinner together occasionally.” Judy Sheldon Carburg is relocating from New Hampshire to Walnut Creek, Calif.—she reconnected with her high school boyfriend, who lives there! “Never too late for love, my friends. Carpe diem.” She will be back East in the summer. Miriam Ercoli Goldberg is in a new chapter: retired, widowed since 2017, and a snowbird. Her son and daughter have careers and families; she has five college-age grandchildren. She never expected to spend half the year in Florida, but she enjoys being outdoors and swimming. “To my delight, my sister is my next-door neighbor.” She is still a Massachusetts resident and shares a house in Cambridge with her daughter, her family, and their two dogs. “I’ve taken up painting in the last decade and find ongoing challenge and occasional satisfaction with that.” She’s enjoyed interesting travel experiences, especially to the Arctic and Croatia. Jill Landefeld has been a therapist at Trauma and Beyond Psychological Center in Los Angeles for five years, providing eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and somatic experiencing to clients with severe trauma. She’s also busy with nature photography and her member-

ship in an anti-racist group for white therapists. “Plus battling old age with Pilates!” Greer Andrews Macready lives in the beautiful Santa Monica Canyon, now with only one Cardigan Welsh corgi, Reba. Unfortunately, Michael, her sweet husband of 41 years, died walking down their street in January. “It was quite a shock, but we had had a lovely Christmas and a nice dinner out the night before. He was 91 and had some medical issues last year that had caused some memory loss. I am not sure how I would have been as a long-term caregiver, and I know for certain he would not have liked to linger on.” After graduation, Joanna Warner Kennedy promptly married Tom Kennedy, on Aug. 29, 1964; they’ll soon celebrate their 60th anniversary. They lived in Cambridge, Mass., while he attended the Episcopal Divinity School; he was ordained a priest in 1968. Joanna attended Harvard Graduate School of Education for her MAT degree (1969). They have three children: Sarah Kennedy Flott ’91, Sam, and Jamie (who both attended Trinity College). Sarah teaches and is a teacher coach at the International Baccalaureate School in Ypsilanti, Mich. Sam is the president and CEO of the Boston Red Sox. Jamie is VP international for the PGA Golf Tour, headquartered in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. Tom and Joanna have eight grandchildren, three girls and five boys. “All are delightful and give us much joy!” Though “retired,” Tom’s ministry continues as he marries, baptizes, and buries while serving on several nonprofit boards. Joanna, apparently nominated the “Grammar Geek,” edited some of her friends’ writing last winter, “mostly targeting run-on sentences, misplaced modifiers, and punctuation issues. My career of tutoring students with reading and writing issues has trained me well!” Joanna and Tom spend “quality time” with two nearby children and five grandchildren (in college and/or working), while texting those living far away. She feels blessed with family, friends, and good health. Judy Pine Edwards and husband Bob (Wesleyan ’63) retired years ago from their work (UCLA math department and the Getty Research Library). They enjoy visiting their two daughters and their families, including three young grandchildren. “We spend two months a year exploring Europe on our Suzuki Burgman scooter and hope to do that for another few years.” Barbara Brachman Fried moved into a retirement community in Wheaton, Ill. “It was hard leaving our house after 45 years, but there is a lot going on here. The food is great and I don’t have to cook.” Last year they went to Turkey and Greece. In May they will visit Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan with Overseas Adventure Travel. She hopes to attend Reunion. Marilyn Kraj Sanford was diagnosed with ALS in 2008, at 66. “Looking back, I showed definite symptoms in 2007 or earlier.” She had retired a few years prior, after a long career in human resource management, and then began a second career in tax and financial planning, starting her own business and teaching at several colleges and universities around Boston. “By 2010 I was no longer able to walk and relied

Never too late for love, my friends. Carpe diem.

— JUDY SHELDON CARBURG ’64

on a power or manual chair, as well as a scooter.” Marilyn then became involved in ALS advocacy with the local chapter of the ALS Association, speaking to scientists, doing media interviews, and attending the NEALS Consortium’s first Clinical Research Learning Institute in 2011. She also spoke at ALS fundraising events and was elected to the board of directors of the ALS Association’s Massachusetts chapter, serving as secretary until July 2018, when they moved to Florida. “While I am confined to a wheelchair, I maintain my tax practice, preparing individual, corporate and trust tax returns as well as representing clients at IRS audits.” When travel to various campuses became difficult she became an online instructor at the University of Phoenix, teaching from 2010 until 2016. “After living with the disease for 14 years, only my legs are affected. I maintain my upper body strength, and my ability to speak, swallow, breathe, etc. remains completely normal. I can’t help but feel that this slow progression might be due in part to the upbeat, positive outlook I strive to maintain, and the fact that I keep busy with my family, clients, and students; professional development; ALS fundraising; and roles in other organizations.” Flora Barth Wolf and Marjorie Tobin Davidson P’92 met in Anna Maria Island, Fla., for lunch. Platt Townend Arnold thanks everyone who sent class notes. She and David still live in East Lyme, Conn., in the house they moved to in 1992. Their two daughters and families are in Coral Springs, Fla., and San Antonio, Texas. “Too far away, mostly visits happen in the summer.” She plays bridge weekly with Hope Batchelder-Stevens and Pat Edwards Anderson; saw Lyn Parker Haas; Zooms monthly with Kirk Palmer Senske, Marcia Silcox Crockett, Cathy Layne Frank, Donna Richmond Carleton and Ann Weatherby Gruner; and enjoys hearing from other classmates occasionally. “I feel well connected to our class, as all those folks have their own threads of friendship and we update each other. Remembering the nuisance of trudging over to the Thames for meals, I appreciate how we grew to know each other as a class more than we would have otherwise. I hope we will take time at our 60th, as we have at each Reunion so far, to meet with just us classmates.”

Correspondents: Susan Peck Hinkel, rerob@mac.com, 1064 N. Main St, Danby, VT 05739, and Pat Antell Andrews, pandre0615@gmail.com, 2800 S. University Blvd., Unit 4, Denver, CO 80210 “Is the liberal arts education irrelevant?” Our class discussion continues. Diane Willen points to “the unconscionable inflation in college costs as a large part of the problem.” Her CC courses in history, literature, philosophy and the arts “enrich and influence me in ways that continue even as I enter my 80s. I hope my grandsons can enjoy comparable experiences.” Following a glowing description of the island of Leros, Greece, Renny Harrigan wrote that a “liberal arts education is needed more than ever but its survival collides with the exorbitant costs of higher education.” Total costs at CC, she mentions, are $82,697, a price tag that “makes job-training programs and the ability to land a job with benefits immediately after gradu-

Flora Barth Wolf ’64 and Marjorie Tobin Davidson ’64 P’92 met in Anna Maria Island, Fla., for lunch.

Marilyn Kraj Sanford ’64 received an award from the Military Officers Association of America’s Cape Canaveral Chapter, the largest chapter in Florida.

ation look much more desirable. I don’t think liberal arts education is dead—it is simply becoming an unaffordable luxury, and we as a society are much the poorer for it.” Further thoughts on this are welcome. Margery (Marge) Tupling Knyper has been busy with her Daughters of Norway organization and is learning different styles of rosemaling, a folk art of Old Norway. She’s found painting plates, bowls and trays with flowers, scrolls and other designs meditative and interesting. She keeps healthy walking and biking, and is in touch with Pamela Gwynn Herrup. Reading Deborah Jowitt’s book about Martha Graham reminds Marge of her gratitude to Conn for all those years of supporting modern dance at the Summer School. “I got to work with great artists both in class and backstage, setting me up for going to New York to pursue my dreams. Being a member of Twyla Tharp’s original company was a result, and though I gave up performing early, it remains an important and fond memory.” Jeanne W. Patenaude-Lane, who lost her husband of 45 years five years ago, is a town-meeting representative in her hometown of Plymouth, Mass. She moved from NYC to care for her parents and now lives in the home where she grew up; memories of her youth abound—though with a reduced collection of her parents’ memorabilia. Leslie Setterholm Curtis moved to the Kimball Farms Retirement Community in the Berkshires, where she is sharpening her bridge skills and is the first-ever female bartender for their weekly cocktail parties. She has “nothing but good things to say about its model” for enjoying her senior years. June Adler Vail reports on “two nice connections with classmates” last winter, friendships beginning “during our dancing days at Conn.” Pam Gwynne Herrup and husband Peter joined June and husband David for a happy New Year’s brunch (second consecutive year), and Emily (Emmy) Erda Devine

and June have met up a few times in Brunswick, where Emily’s son and family have moved. “I look forward to seeing more of both of them!”

Marty Alter Chen and husband Lincoln bought a winter home in Goa, India, and Suzanne Leach Charity joined them at a nearby resort to celebrate Marty’s 80th in February. In August, Lucia Pellecchia Correll, Roxanne Lake Johnson and Karin Kunstler Goldman celebrated their 80th birthdays with a trip to Conn, where they picnicked on the lawn, reminisced, and thought about classmate Janice Carey, who died in 1989. Karin is “having difficulty making that big retirement decision, since my boss, Attorney General Letitia James, is so extraordinary. Leaving her will be hard.” Karin is in close contact with Elizabeth (Betsy) Leitner Kovacs, who celebrated her 12th anniversary with Jack, her Coast Guard friend from college years. Carole McNamara Malcolmson and Jenny Bartlett Fricks celebrated the Christmas holiday together. Former roommates Dana Hartman Freyer, Pam Gwynne Herrup, Marge Raisler Fisher and Karen Metzger Ganz gathered in Vermont.

Correspondents: Carol Chaykin and Bridget Donahue Healy, ccnotes66@ gmail.com Bridget Donahue Healy and Katherine Curtis Donahue and husbands Mike and Bill met for an overnight stay at the Wentworth by the Sea Hotel in New Castle, N.H., on Jan. 31. Bridget and Mike came from Brunswick, Maine, to Durham, N.H., on the Amtrak Downeaster. Ellen Kagan is committed to making sure that Biden and Harris are reelected in November, through posts to all of her contacts; phone calls around the country; and promoting Joe and Kamala on her podcast, Movin’ and Groovin’ with Ellen, as well as making campaign contributions and signing petitions. Ellen wants

to ensure that every 18- to 21-year-old is registered. Betsy Litchfield Cetron loves living in New London, N.H., where she plays tennis, skis, sails and enjoys water-related boards. Life is good! Janet Sandberg Horwitz and Donna Vogt Cartwright enjoyed reminiscing about different experiences at CC when they met at Goodwin House life-care community in Falls Church, Va., in February. Lary Smith has had five alliterative poems published in Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology, edited by Dennis Wilson Wise, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2023. Lary turned 80 on New Year’s Day, and she and husband John Wright Daschke, Ph.D., celebrated their 50th anniversary in August 2023. Lary is still in touch with Louise Faye Despres and with Jill Andrist Miller ’65.

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Correspondents: Deborah Greenstein, debbyg837@verizon.net, and Marcia Hunter Matthews, marciamatthews3@gmail. com Anne Moloney Black and her husband had calm and happy holidays with their three girls and their families, all of whom live nearby. Their health issues are under control; her life these days is focused on PT and swimming. Anne enjoys regular Zoom calls with Nancy Newcomb, Sue Leahy Eldert, Heather Woods Ames, Susie Endel Kerner, Georgia Whidden P’91 and Susan (Susie) Cohn Doran. The conversations have a broad range; “we all carry on just like we always did. Life is good!” Carolyn Anderson Kilgour and husband Bob own a small farm in Lancaster County, Pa., nestled among beautiful Amish farmlands. They have preserved the farm, in perpetuity, with the Lancaster Farmland Trust; it can never be developed and is guaranteed to stay in agriculture. They live an 18th-century lifestyle, with farm buildings dating to the late 1700s. Active in the Trust, they are committed to farmland preser-

Former roommates Dana Hartman Freyer ’65, Pam Gwynne Herrup ’65, Marge Raisler Fisher ’65 and Karen Metzger Ganz ’65 gathered in Vermont.

Marcia Hunter Matthews ’67 and her husband, Bill, with Judith Macurda Oates ’67 and her husband, Jim

Carole McNamara Malcolmson ’65 and Jenny Bartlett Fricks ’65

Janice Robinson Alfieri ’67, right, with Peggy Probasco, an old friend from her days flying for Pan Am

Bridget Donahue Healy ’66 and Katherine Curtis Donahue ’66 in Durham, N.H., in January

Wallis Lindburg Nicita ’67, right, with Alicia Yaffe and Wally’s son Jesse

Janet Sandberg Horwitz ’66 and Donna Vogt Cartwright ’66 in Falls Church, Va., in February

Susan Endel Kerner ’67 and husband Paul on safari

Roxanne Lake Johnson ’65, Karin Kunstler Goldman ’65 and Lucia Pellecchia Correll ’65 visited the room in Branford that they once shared.

Ethel Bottcher Cullinan ’67 enjoying Japan

vation and have enjoyed helping other landowners preserve their beautiful land. Carolyn sent a link to a short video of her and Bob discussing farmland preservation with the Trust, including drone footage of their Meadow Springs Farm (tinyurl.com/ yvem9s77). It is worth watching. Marcia Hunter Matthews and husband Bill had lunch with Jim and Judith Macurda Oates in Sarasota, Fla., in February—a wonderful time catching up with old friends. Both Jim and Bill have Parkinson’s and it was good for them to share stories. Janice Robinson Alfieri and Peggy Probasco, an old friend from Janice’s days flying for Pan Am, caught up on a park bench. Wallis Lindburg Nicita spent quality time with Alicia Yaffe and Wally’s son Jesse. Ethel Bottcher Cullinan enjoyed a trip to Japan. Susan Endel Kerner and husband Paul embarked on a safari.

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Correspondent: Judi Bamberg Mariggiò, jgmariggio@gmail.com, Via Beppe Fenoglio, 10 Canale CN 12043, Italy John and Zoilita (Zoi) Aponte Diamond celebrated 30 years together with a cruise from Lima to Buenos Aires. A highlight was lunch with Maria Varela Berchesi in Punta del Este, Uruguay, where Maria has a summer home. During a previous cruise around South America, Zoi saw Maria in her hometown of Montevideo. Zoi lives in North Palm Beach, Fla., and summers in her beloved Portsmouth, N.H. In January, Alice Boatwright wrapped up a six-month project to publish new editions of her first Ellie Kent mysteries, Under an English Heaven and What Child Is This?, and to finish and publish the third in the series, In the Life Ever After. Becoming her own publisher at Firefly Ink Books involved a steep learning curve, but she’s pleased with the results. Alice is also grateful for the collaboration of classmates Judi Bamberg Mariggiò (with an Italian translation in book one) and Kathleen MacInnis Kichline (with questions about the Resurrection for book three). Alice is happily writing and working on book four. Nancy Horovitz Bachrach was commissioned to adapt the narrative of Peter and the Wolf, which Prokofiev wrote to explain musical instruments to children. The New York Piano Society presented a piano-only version of the music with Nancy’s new narration at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in April. Joan Hosmer Smith enjoyed a safari in Tanzania with friends and Connecticut Audubon. “The trip ranks at the top of nature travel experiences, along with Antarctica and the Galápagos Islands. Go, if you have good health and the means to get there.” After more than a decade as temporary guardians, Anne Hutchinson and husband Gene Kalish have become permanent guardians for Erving Henderson until he turns 18 in May. “He heads to Springfield College in the fall, and the FAFSA forms required us to have a legal relationship.” Anne is mentoring Erving’s best friend through the college search, “which included a great 24 hours at Conn for their intro to the college admission process. Heather Morrison P’95 and I recognized each other; she was there with a granddaughter.” Anne runs the busy food pantry in Great Barrington, though they’re searching for an actual paid director, and the local school committee fills her time: “dealing with rising costs, shrinking enrollment, building a

new school, and the inclusion of all students and families. My husband is ready to retire from all our civic responsibilities. A retirement community after Erving graduates from high school may be next.” Phil and Kate Saner Pennington still enjoy summers on their boat (Monk 36) kept in the Thousand Islands on the St. Lawrence River. They mostly spend winters in their home in south central Pennsylvania, where Kate volunteers with the Food Bank, exercises, reads a lot, and spends time with friends and family. She had a rightknee replacement and the left is scheduled. “This getting older isn’t easy on the body!” She and Phil are moving to a continuing-care facility outside Philadelphia, just 20 minutes from their children and families. “Downsizing and selling aren’t easy, but we want to do it while we can enjoy our new community. Grandkids, third grade to Colby College junior, are growing up fast, but we’ll see more of them when we live closer.” Ellen Steinberg Karch marvels, “I have two grandchildren in college! Although my husband’s family are in New Jersey and Minnesota, mine are close to us in Maryland and doing well. I’m grateful to have returned to pre-pandemic activities, including get-togethers with friends, volunteering, book group, etc., and hope to include Reunion among my coming adventures.” Jim and Nancy Taylor

begins with the origins of slavery and continues through the Jim Crow era and segregation to the current time of mass incarceration. Finally, we visited the extraordinary sculpture Mothers of Gynecology, by Michelle Browder, which highlights three enslaved women who were used by the American obstetrician J. Marion Sims to practice treating fistulas without anesthesia.” We send our condolences to the family and friends of Helen Harasimowicz Walters, who died on Nov. 7, 2023.

70Correspondent: Myrna Chandler Goldstein, myrnacgoldstein@gmail.com

This getting older isn’t easy on the body!

— KATE SANER PENNINGTON ’69

Vineburgh moved to Essex, Conn., after living in a golf community in Bluffton, S.C., for 15 years. Originally from New Haven, she’s now closer to New London, as well as to grandchildren in Boston. Nancy took up piano and is chairing the fundraiser for Community Music School in Centerbrook, where she is on the development committee. In 2023, she and Jim celebrated their 50th anniversary on the Essex Clipper Dinner Train, with a full car of family and friends. Although Nancy spent only her last two years at CC, she looks forward to our 55th reunion. In January, Elizabeth Tobin Mueller and three women friends went on a civil rights pilgrimage to Montgomery and Selma, Ala. “First, we revisited some of the history that happened while we were at Conn: the 50-mile voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Next, we toured the not-to-be-missed Legacy Museum created by the Equal Justice Initiative. This beautiful museum

Sally Appenzellar and husband John spent two weeks in Saudi Arabia. “We went with some trepidation, but I can report a wonderful trip, people and much to see. Most women wear the abaya, headscarf and face covering, but the clothing restrictions are loosening. We saw 8,000-yearold petroglyphs, Nabatean tombs from 200 BC, wadi/oasis with fruit-tree farms, sandstone mountains, fields of volcanic rock, beautiful seashores and museums, and visited the holy city of Medina. As non-Muslims, we could only visit the Prophet Mosque from outside and see its incredible flower umbrella columns. We live on the Vineyard but travel extensively. I am in my 18th year as a conservation commissioner. We catch Lucy Thomson on the Island and visit with Carol Campbell in New Hampshire.” Nancy Lauter moved from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she had lived for 30 years, back to Newton, Mass., where she raised her daughters from 1976 to 1994. “I moved to Lasell Village, a senior-living community.” Last September, she had a “wonderful adventure with Carol Brennan and Ginger Henry Keunzel on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland.” She has been Zooming with Carol, Ginger, Diane Capodilupo Taylor and Priscilla Christianson Newbury. “There is nothing in the world like old friends.” Nancy is still working on being retired. “I liked working a whole lot better. I do a lot of volunteering, a bit of consulting and take lots of courses.” She is “blessed with four incredible grandkids— two, ages 13 and 10, here in Newton, and two, ages 8 and 5, in Boulder, Colo.” Marjorie (Marji) McBride P’96 is finishing her 24th and last year as an elected school committee member in the Bristol Warren Regional School Committee in Rhode Island. Her children and grandchildren are

Zoi Aponte Diamond ’69 and Maria Varela Berchesi ’69 enjoyed time together when a South American cruise brought Zoi to Montevideo, Uruguay, where Maria has a summer home.

Leslie Colton Null ’70 and husband Gary traveled to Morocco in December 2023 and rode camels in the Sahara Desert.

doing well; all but one grandchild (in ninth grade) are in college or graduate school. “Couldn’t get one to go to Conn. So holding out for the last one or a generation will be missed.” Marji’s husband, Jay, is retired, and he volunteers at the VA hospital in Providence. “He’s in a wheelchair now; we don’t get around much but seem to be forever busy.” She would like anyone who loves water polo to know that their oldest son, John, is a coach for the U.S. Olympic water polo team in Paris this summer. Marji and Jay also have two other sons, and they raised her sister, Tracy, too. “It’s been a good life, and I’m happy to still be here.” Writing from St. Louis, Lisa Richter still works at Stakeholder Insights, her marketing and consulting firm, and takes care of her 8-year-old twin granddaughters on school holidays, as well as her husband, who has Parkinson’s. “I just joined the board of Memory Care Home Solutions, which hopes to be a test site for a CMS innovation pilot test that will gather evidence to propose that the government include dementia-caregiver support services as part of Medicare reimbursement.” Still, her number one priority is “daily exercise and a healthy diet to be able to keep doing all that!” Rachel Sherbourne Cooney, who lives in Newport, R.I., is semiretired. “After 28 years as a school social worker, I am in private practice in Wakefield, R.I. I also visit my son, his wife and my two grandchildren in Los Angeles, as well as help at my daughter’s retail store, Resails, in Newport.” Resails (resails.com) sells bags made out of used sails, as well as upscale clothing. “For those classmates traveling to Newport, I run a B&B out of my home (cooneycottage.com). Come by and visit.” Mary-Jane Atwater and husband Walt took “a fabulous trip to Antarctica” where they “hiked among the penguins and marveled at whales, seals, seabirds and extraordinary otherworldly ice formations.” At home in central Virginia, Mary-Jane is involved in their aging-in community village, which has grown since its founding eight years ago. She visits her Boston-based family, including granddaughters ages 8 and 5, as often as possible. Myrna Chandler Goldstein’s most recent book, Treatments for Anxiety: Fact versus Fiction, is listed on Amazon. Leslie Colton Null and husband Gary traveled to Morocco in December on a two-week Dartmouth Alumni group tour. The 14 attendees included Dartmouth Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Jonathan Smolin and a wonderful local guide, Seddik Aasim. Among the sites and cities they visited, Erfoud was high on the list because, near there, they enjoyed riding camels in the Sahara Desert. “I shared some of our photos with

Mariana (Mimi) Griswold Geer and Melanie Dreisbach, with whom I’ve reconnected since our 50th reunion. In other exciting news, on Nov. 1, 2023, our son, Scott Rothkopf, became the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City.” The family, including daughter Taura and her husband, Jason; granddaughter Posey (11); son Scott and his husband, Jonathan; and grandson George (22 months), celebrated the event together in New York at Thanksgiving.

72Correspondents: Barbara White Morse, barbarawmorse@gmail.com, and Ann Tousignant, anntousignant@gmail.com Lynne Miller Moshe writes, “Many of you have written to me to ask about the war situation here in Israel and I really appreciate your concern. I was a volunteer in the summer of 1971 in Kibbutz Be’eri, where terrorists attacked on Oct. 7 and slaughtered so many people, including two good friends I knew from my volunteer days. So sad to know they are gone. The area where I live now (Jezreel Valley near Nazareth) has been relatively safe but there are a lot of rocket attacks an hour north of us in and around Kiryat Shmona, where we lived and brought up our four children before we retired. It is near the Lebanon border and has been a frequent Hezbollah target over the years. The town has been evacuated and family members and friends who live there have been relocated and are scattered in safer alternative living arrangements in other regions of the country until the hostilities are over and they can return home. One daughter lives in the south and at the beginning of the war had frequent rocket attacks in her area from Hamas in Gaza. We are all hoping for a peaceful settlement soon and the safe return of our hostages. Avshalom and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in December. We got married during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and now 50 years later we are at war again. When things quiet down we are hoping to have a nice celebration with all the family, including our 11 beautiful grandchildren, ages 5 months to 18 years old.”  Bernadette Prue is back to traveling at least one overseas trip per year. She enjoys working in her extensive organic perennial and vegetable gardens. She sings with Capella Cantorum, a local chamber choir, and rejoined the Connecticut River Artisans Co-op, in Essex, Conn., where she exhibits her jewelry. She took an incredible visit to Antarctica in February 2022 with National Geographic and a trip to England in May 2023 for the coronation and to explore southern England and Wales. In Bath, she learned to fly a Harris hawk named Charlie at a raptor sanctuary.

She also took a trip with National Geographic in July 2022 to Greenland, exploring both the Arctic and the Antarctic in the same year. This year will find her in Canada, including Quebec City, which her ancestors helped found as part of Champlain’s explorations. Norma Drab Goldstein and husband Allen have been living on their sailboat Afterglow since March 2023. They have sailed the East Coast from Maine to Annapolis and from Annapolis to the Bahamas. “We snorkeled in the Exumas, ate delicious conch salads in Nassau where we honeymooned 36 years ago, and fed food to rare rock iguanas in Allen Cay. We will ship our boat home to Seattle. Retirement has been fun and busy.” Merrily Gerrish retired from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in October 2023. She enjoys retirement but is open to working again part-time if she can find the right gig. Barbara White Morse and husband Ted had a year to remember in 2023! The kids organized a surprise 50th anniversary (with DJ and dancing in the moonlight) at their summer home on Chebeague Island, Maine, and then organized a special family 50th anniversary weekend in October at a lake in Maryland with all 13 (pontoon boat was a big hit with the grandkids). They also took a trip to Germany and Switzerland in June with close friends: Dachau (sobering), Lake Lucerne (think Heidi), Zermatt (Matterhorn), Mosel River valley (vineyard and castles). And on a Road Scholar trip in October to Rome, Florence, and Venice they saw all the paintings we studied freshman year in art history plus cathedrals galore and enjoyed delicious pasta.

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Correspondent: Hester Kinnicutt Jacobs, djacobs@midrivers.com Lynne Griffiths Allen writes a tribute to Professor Bill Cibes: “He was a special person in my time at Conn and in my life. In the spring of 1973, somehow Bill Cibes had kept track of me and my interests and told me that the City of New York was looking for assistant management analysts. Because of this lead, I ended up in my dream job, providing federal funds to renovate low-income housing in NYC in their Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development, and started my professional life in my dream city. Thank you, Bill, for paying attention and making a big difference in my life!” Marcia Wallace is in her third year as Mountain View (Ark.) Art Guild president, continuing her lifelong involvement as an arts educator and producer. In September she explored Edinburgh and parts of northern England with a friend and plans to join Caroleen Frey ’74 in Oaxaca next winter. “Life in the rural Ozark Mountains has a rhythm

Barbara White Morse ’72 P’03 with Ted and friends in Matterhorn, Switzerland

Bernadette Prue ’72 in Bath, England

Barbara White Morse ’72 P’03 and Ted at a 50th anniversary party on Chebeague Island, Maine

Bernadette Prue ’72 in Antarctica on her birthday

different from Connecticut.  There were predictable problems during January’s snow and record low temps, but the area’s water system failing wasn’t one of them.” In her valley, neighbors fired up their tractors to clear the gravel road, shared rides in their 4x4s, and provided well water to those who lost city water. “It was a beautiful, quiet time.” She and husband Tom will be looking skyward on April 8 as the total eclipse passes directly overhead. In November 2023, Margaret (Maggi) Elbert Paar toured historic Deerfield, Mass., and explored Shelburne Falls with Barbara Hess Depasquale, Catherine Niles Bush, Donna Bellantone and Lynda McCurdy Hotra. Lynda and Debby Dearborn ’67 are trustees of Historic Deerfield. Joelle Desloovere Schon P’03 and husband Jeff are still part-time in Nairobi, Kenya, where he is the founder and CEO of Akili Kids!, a children’s educational TV station, and she works as a video editor. The highlight of their year was in August, when daughter Chloé Schon Geary ’03 and family (including husband Jordan Geary ’04) visited for the first time and they all went on a safari. After cataract surgery, Joseph Srednicki  can now see without contact lenses or glasses for the first time since third grade. He takes organ lessons and is polishing Sweelinck’s “Fantasia in Echo Style in D Dorian” and Bach’s “O Mensch, bewein’.” He highly recommends Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, one of the monuments of Western music. With his improved eyesight he continues his fiber-arts projects in knitting, crocheting, and rug hooking. He stays in touch with David Clark and Stephanie Oppenheimer Lucy Weiger wrote from Kenya on her way to Tanzania to relive a trip she took with her parents. Her husband joined her on her current trip. Highlights included the animals (of course) and the islands of Lamu and Zanzibar. Hester Kinnicutt Jacobs enjoys life in Montana. “We have no plans for travel in 2024, since we had three trips last year, all in the States. January 2025 will see us in Tahiti with my son and daughter and their families for a week. David and I will then head to New Zealand for another 90-day adventure.”

Correspondent: Barbara Herbst Tatum, Barbara.tatum52@gmail.com Catherine Menges Zagunis and Pamela Strawbridge Mashke look forward to our 50th reunion, where they both hope to see many classmates. Pam has had a “whirlwind three years” beginning with selling her longtime home in Chicago, rehabbing a new home in Leland, Mich., and entertaining family and friends there. More recently, Pam’s husband, Rich, settled into a local assisted-living residence. Now she has begun the “long-expected process of rehabbing ME!” Happily, she has many opportunities to keep healthy and busy.

With a top priority of making new friends, Pam has four part-time jobs: marketing for the assisted-living residence, giving weekly piano concerts for the residents, teaching water aerobics at the local pool, and skin consulting for Rodan + Fields. She is “trying desperately to maintain a memory!” Ellen Feldman Thorp is contending with a repeat, stubborn lung infection, which she hopes will not keep her from Reunion. By then, she and Edd will have moved to their home in Wyoming, completed last April—their dream come true. They find the vibe of the town relaxed and inviting. Edd is a cowboy at heart, enjoying their 40 acres and boarding five horses for the local polo fields; Ellen has a pickleball club; and they are part of a “geriatric gang” of 10 who roam the Bighorn Mountains on four-wheelers. In winter, Ellen and Edd live in southern Utah, where Ellen plays as much pickleball as possible. She and her partner have done well, taking two silvers in the Huntsman World Senior Games and gold in a

Why the hell do you think I’m at a college that just went coed if it wasn’t to escape football?

— BILL WEEKS ’73

local tournament. “Crazy to think we are competing in 70+!” Happy news from Sherry Alpert and fiancé Jay Foley, who are getting married at the Paul Revere Heritage Museum in Canton, Mass., on June 9, just a week after our 50th reunion. They have been raising money for the museum. While spending the winter at their home in Vero Beach, Fla., Sherry was in touch with Amy Cohen and Hester Kinnicutt Jacobs ’73. Janet Lawler looks forward to mixing it up with old and new friends at Reunion 50. She will participate in Saturday afternoon’s Creative at Conn: Authors, Artists, and More and share her most recent picture book, There’s No Place Like Hope, a kid-friendly exploration of how hope makes us loving, courageous, and connected. Janet and husband Jeff Coppage still play tennis and winter platform tennis, which she discovered at Conn. They regularly visit son Andy and his wife in greater Boston and daughter Cami in Miami. Janet has chatted via Zoom with Holly Rodgers Wescott and sees niece Brittany Coppage MacGilpin ’04 at family gatherings. JoAnn Ferari Holmes retired after a career in human resources and a second career as an occupational therapy assistant. She is regularly in touch with Nancy Stuart

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Correspondents: Estella Johnson, estjohnson1@aol.com, and Miriam Josephson Whitehouse, mirwhitehouse@gmail. com Katy Skrebutenas was presented the 2023 New Jersey Library Association Distinguished Service Award (College and University Section) on June 1, 2023, in recognition of her long career as head of reference services at Princeton Theological Seminary. She retired as the Director of Research and Public Services in 2021. She is the very proud aunt of Caroline Skrebutenas ’25.

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Correspondents: Kenneth Abel, 334 West 19th St., Apt. 2-B, New York, NY 10011, kenn616@aol.com, and Susan Hazlehurst Milbrath, P.O. Box 3962, Greenwood Village, CO 80155-3962, shmilbrath@gmail.com After retiring from a career in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, Nancy Frechette enjoys living with her partner in the Oregon mountains. She works as a freelance journalist in health and wellness and writes children’s books. Sadly, Lynda Batter Munro’s husband, Bruce, whom she’s been with her entire adult life, died in September. “I am moving to Belfast, Maine, hoping for some joy again. Louise (Holly) Wise P’10 lives in Belfast and has been a great help and friend.” Daughter Heather Munro ’08 teaches anthropology at King’s College London, and Lynda plans to visit. Martin Berman still lives in Hong Kong, where he’s mostly been since graduation and where he founded and runs Micro-Pak (micropakltd.com). He and his wife of 40 years, Else, have three children and five grandchildren. “When I see so many bright and talented students in CC Magazine, I wonder, ‘How the hell did I ever get in?’” Since retiring eight years ago, William Eldon (and Elizabeth Dolliver Eldon) brings us up to date: “Beth has (mostly) retired from the biology department at California State University Long Beach, and will be fully retired in June, when she turns over CSULB’s stem-cell training grant (funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine), of which she’s been co-administrator. In July 2020 we purchased a small Casita travel trailer (named Häusle), which has already traveled about 45,000 miles around the U.S., including an 11-week trip in 2022 across the South, up the coast to Maine and back across the Midwest, and a six-week trip in 2023 from Southern California to Maine, Nova Scotia, and back across Canada and the upper Midwest, as well as trips up and down the West Coast and to Glacier National Park, Banff and Jasper. Our dog, Wilson, has been to 43 of the lower 48 states and five Canadian provinces, and earned his Bark Ranger badge from the National Park Service! With all these miles, Beth has become proficient at reading and knitting in the truck. Our 2022 trip took us through Connecticut at Easter, and we enjoyed meeting up with College organist John Anthony (who played at our wedding in Harkness Chapel in August 1978) just after his retirement celebration and singing with his church choir in Niantic on Easter Eve. We also met up with Cindy Crooker ’75, Bill Morrison, Patricia Harcourt-Chu, Alya Reeve ’77 and Hank Kornfeld along the way. Bill is a clinician referee with USRowing, officiating at various regattas. Beth and I sing with our church choir and with the Long Beach Chorale. In April we’ll visit a ranch outside Waco, Texas, for the solar

L-R: Barbara Hess Depasquale ’73, Maggi Elbert Paar ’73, Cathy Niles Bush ’73, Donna Bellantone ’73, Lynda McCurdy Hotra ’73

Lucy Weiger ’73 and husband in Kenya

Janet Lawler ’74 with her newest book, There’s No Place Like Hope.

Nina George Hacker ’76 will celebrate her 70th birthday and 30th wedding anniversary.

eclipse, and in late June we’ll take that Alaska cruise we wanted to take for our 25th anniversary—for the 21st anniversary of that anniversary.” In Cincinnati, Kenneth Kabel P’12 says being retired is a delight—nice to choose how to spend the days. “I’ve resumed woodworking, and I hike and ride bikes with friends. I volunteer with a charter school in Cincinnati and a woodworking facility that turns scrap lumber into useful tables. Through our temple, my wife and I sponsor a wonderful Afghan family who are swiftly becoming productive Americans. Retirement brought a new adventure: horseback riding lessons. I enjoy weekly rides with four friends, proving it’s never too late to learn a new sport.” Recently Bill Morrison received a text from an unsuspecting CC student fundraiser, attempting to use the school’s athletic programs to entice him into donating. No disrespect, but anyone who knows Bill knows the sports angle would stand as much of a chance of hooking him as, say, a call from Rose Mary Woods offering

a course in audio engineering. But Bill figured it would be impolite not to answer, so he texted back the story of his decision to attend our alma mater (with apologies to those who’ve heard it many times already): “It was the fall of 1970. Although I was only a high school junior, I had become involved with WCNI. My mother worked in the Psychology Department and had connected me with some students who were reviving the station; since I had a rudimentary understanding of electronics and music, I was of some use. One afternoon in the studio, then in the Jane Addams basement, the phone rang. The caller, under the misapprehension that the DJs had some special connection to the outside world, wanted to know who Yale was playing that weekend. The DJ (Bill Weeks ’73, curmudgeonly beyond his years), growled, ‘Why the hell do you think I’m at a college that just went coed if it wasn’t to escape football?’ Little did he know that he had just made my college choice for me.” After living in North Carolina’s

Durham–Chapel Hill area for 40+ years, Elizabeth Taylor has moved to Morgantown, W.Va., closer to one daughter and her family. Elizabeth has been a CPA for decades, and is now in private practice after working in public accounting, the nonprofit sector and venture capital. When it isn’t tax season, she heads to the mountains. She has been a leader and cook on Sierra Club National Service Outings for 20+ years. This summer she will lead a women’s backpacking trip to the Ruby Mountains in Nevada and cook for a trip in Yosemite. Nina George Hacker will celebrate her 70th birthday and 30th wedding anniversary. Nina and Rick are in their eighth year as rector (Nina) and organist/choir director (Rick) serving St. John’s Episcopal Church in Compass, Pa. After publishing her first novel in 2023, she’s working on a second and hopes to get it to press by year-end.

Marjorie Nelson Macintyre ’78 enjoying a refreshing Aperol spritz

Isabel Borras Marinon ’78 on one of the Caminos de Santiago

Caroline Boyce ’78 and Joseph Koerner (artist Henry Koerner’s son) stand in the first-floor studio of the artist’s home—bought and historically preserved by Caroline—in front of Henry Koerner’s magical realist painting Mountaintop, 1948.

Joan Pachner ’78 and Lucia Montero de Benavides ’79 traveled to Mexico City together for Art Week.

Correspondent: Stuart Sadick, stuart. sadick@gmail.com Michael Tulin met wife Cheryl in 2008; the second marriage for both. Cheryl has swum competitively since high school. “When we met I tagged along to her U.S. Masters swim meets. Around 2013, while she was once swimming laps, I got in and could not make 25 yards without stopping. ‘I’m going to teach you how to breathe,’ she said. Now her passion is mine.” At 60, Michael joined the Masters team at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center in Pasadena, Calif., and they both compete with U.S. Masters in regional and national meets. “Slight difference. She is a national champion several times over, and I, usually finishing last in my age group, am happy just to get better.” Last August they traveled to Fukuoka, Japan, for the World Masters, with 6,000 swimmers from around the world. Cheryl had several top 10s and placed third in the 400-meter individual medley. Michael swam the 50-meter freestyle and two relays. “I was consternated and had great trepidation. I did not want to be last in the world. There were 95 swimmers in the 65-69 age group. Lo and behold, I came in 84th, taking a full second off my previous competition. I was elated and so relieved!” Thomas Howland is happily living the life of a pensioner in England. Last year he took a clipper ship cruise in the Mediterranean, from outside Rome around to Venice, stopping in Capri, Sicily, Montenegro and Croatia. He then spent Christmas and New Year’s in Sri Lanka, followed by a January–February stay in Brunei and the Philippines. More trips are planned for the coming two years. “At home, I’m busy volunteering for the British Red Cross, playing tennis and enjoying the theater; both attending productions in London and acting in plays with two local amateur theater groups.”

Correspondents: Susan Greenberg Gold, sbggold@gmail.com, and Laurie Heiss, laurieheiss@gmail.com Marcella Monk Flake won a Connecticut Arts Hero award in January. Marcella has over 37 years of teaching experience, with most of her career dedicated to students in New Haven’s Talented and Gifted Program. She is the founder and executive director of Monk Youth Jazz, which provides biweekly instruction in hip-hop dance, ballet, pre-engineering, architecture and design, financial literacy, human anatomy and physiology, and music. Marcella has mentored and empowered

countless individuals in the performing arts and STEAM and has been referred to as one of the most compassionate and genuine arts leaders of her generation. During COVID, Caroline Boyce moved back to Pittsburgh and bought the historic landmark home/studio/gallery of renowned artist Henry Koerner, best known for his 60+ covers of Time magazine and as a leader of the magical realism movement. While living in and preserving the home, Caroline is learning about this amazing man and his art. She spent the past four years working with former Pittsburgh Steelers Pro Bowl linebacker Ryan Shazier on establishing his foundation, which provides support to individuals with spinal cord injuries, work she finds rewarding. Caroline loves spending time with her children and grandchildren, traveling, and staying in touch with CC friends. Marjorie Nelson Macintyre retired last June and is busy traveling and finally enjoying Vermont with her retired friends. “Being able to travel freely is great. I just had a

There were some Big Chill moments, only it was better.

— DAVID FIDERER ’79

wonderful three-week trip to Australia and New Zealand! We did Morocco and then Israel and Jordan last year. We plan to do Alaska’s Inside Passage by cruise this summer and Scandinavia in the fall. Finally putting that Modern European Studies degree to use.” Isabel Borras Marinon shares: “Hi! Semiretired, with a gorgeous grandson. Living in Puerto Rico and spending at least three months a year in Mallorca. I have completed four Caminos de Santiago, with the fifth this May. I took a two-week course in Italian cooking in Calabria last summer.” Ellen Ramsbottom Jarrett P’13 still works at Porter Square Books in Cambridge and lives in Marblehead, Mass. She reads, cycles, rows, and spends time with her two granddaughters, one the daughter of Tim Jarrett ’13. “On a recent trip to NYC, Janet Chandler Grant ’76 and I took a walking tour of Central Park with Donald Capelin P’15, who volunteers with the Central Park Conservancy. He imparted an amazing amount of knowledge about the park and its history.” Ellen attended the wedding of the daughter of Christine Gould Reardon ’79 and Michael Reardon in Litchfield, Conn., last fall. Also in attendance were John Talty ’80 and Beth Michelman Gross ’80.

Correspondent: Vicki Chesler, vachesler@gmail.com Barry Norman has written two more books. Bad Day for Grandpa is a compilation of his short stories, including “Radio Banksy,” featuring Kurt Vonnegut as a character, “inspired by his appearance at our college library dedication in 1976.” His ninth book comes out soon, “about the unlikely job I now find myself doing: being a psychedelic-dressed substitute high school teacher at the fourth most diverse school in Massachusetts.” Stephanie Russell-Splawn and husband Calvin celebrated their 12th anniversary with a trip to Spain and Portugal. “He has been my love and chosen one for 19 years. I wish everyone a healthy and beautiful 2024.” Debra Daigle is mostly retired but “I still keep my toe in the radio broadcasting business. For two years I have been a news broadcaster on Boston’s AM 1510 WMEX Radio, providing retro newscasts for an oldies countdown show hosted by amazing air personality Jeff Lawrence. Jeff sends me news stories from the past, and I rewrite them into radio-speak, then produce them at home from a digital recording system and send the MP3s to Jeff to insert into his weekly shows.” Debra has a new cat, named Mr. D after her beloved high school music director, and she sings soprano with the Concord Chorus. David Rosenberg and wife Laurel got together with Mary Wright P’11 and husband Les a few times on Hilton Head Island, where David and Laurel live full-time. Mary and Les rented a home there for the winter. Kenneth Hochberg retired from a career at Teva Pharmaceuticals, where he was an IT director managing web applications. He is moving to Tucson, Ariz., where dark skies will support a growing astronomy hobby. After several decades of lying fallow, Ken has begun painting again (see Instagram @kenhochberg). When the pandemic hit, Susan Zakin started a magazine, Journal of the Plague Years (journaloftheplagueyears.ink), named after Daniel Defoe’s account of the Great Plague in London in the 1600s. “Defoe’s book is regarded as the first work of creative nonfiction because, although the book is written in the first person by ‘H.L.,’ Defoe himself was a toddler when London was wracked by plague. In that spirit, we used innovative (but not unethical!) journalism and nonfiction to reach readers in a time of crisis. Now we’re publishing an anthology of the same name under our publishing imprint, Blue Books. On the personal front, my now ex-husband and I succeeded in breaking my

Vicki Chesler ’79, right; Amanda Marshall Zingg ’79; Vicki’s husband, Matt Kovner, left; and Amanda’s husband, Christopher Zingg ’79.

Mark Teschner ’79 recently received his 11th Emmy award for casting on General Hospital.

Stephanie Russell-Splawn ’79 and husband Calvin celebrated their 12th anniversary with a trip to Spain and Portugal.

Susan Zakin ’79 with her twin stepsons, who recently became U.S. citizens.

L-R: David Fiderer ’79, Tommy Usdin ’79, Steven Shaffer ’79, Michael Brettler ’79 and Bradshaw Rost ’79 got together for a long weekend of fun at Tommy’s home in Glenville, N.C., last fall.

twin stepsons free from the immigration stalemate of the Trump years. We are so happy to have these great kids (and freshly minted U.S. citizens) with us!”  Lucia Montero de Benavides attended the Maco, ACME and Material art fairs in Mexico City with Joan Pachner ’78. Joan was an Art History major and has a Ph.D. Lucia was a History major and is the board chair of EnseñaPeru, part of the Teach for All network founded by Wendy Kopp (founder of Teach for America). Joan and Lucia get together when Lucia travels to NYC from Lima, Peru, where she lives. Joan and her family visited Lucia in Lima a few years ago. Barbara Goodman Wilson sends greetings from Connecticut. For the past 32 years, after earning a graduate degree in landscape architecture from UMass Amherst, she’s been working at several design firms creating beautiful landscapes for homeowners in Fairfield County, Conn. “A few years ago, I opened my own landscape architecture design firm and now have time to pursue my passion of horseback riding. In the winter I travel to Florida to train and compete in dressage competitions with my horse Gloria.” Last fall,  Jay Faber attended the wedding of Jack Fiskio, son of Gail Finnerty Fiskio ’78 P’17 and Mark Fiskio P’17 in Nashville, Tenn. Also in attendance were Emilie Fiskio ’17, Jim Glick ’78 and wife Sa, Peter Musser ’78 and wife Loredana Regolo Musser ’80, and Ann (Nini) Gridley ’78. Jay and Tom Deedy ’78 speak frequently, occasionally collaborating on music projects. Tom lives in New London and has made several recordings with ex-Reducer band member Hugh Birdsall under the band name The Ground Zero Boys. On a recent trip to L.A., Jay spent an afternoon with Jordan Trachtenberg and Michael Fishman. Jordan is enjoying retirement. Mike lives in Hartford, Conn., but recently completed renovations on a summer house in Newport, R.I. (Conn alumni welcome). Through an email chain, Jay talks frequently with Tom (TK) Kadzis ’78, his brother Dick (Buzzman) Kadzis ’77, Mike Duggan ’77, Tracey Masters ’77 and Gerard (Beaver) Morrin. David Fiderer writes: “Last fall, our CC crew traveled to Tommy Usdin’s summer home in Glenville, N.C., for a long weekend of hiking, boating, great meals, carousing and even a visit to the Biltmore Estate. There were some Big Chill moments, only it was better. Old stories were retold with surprising new revelations. The hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains were challenging and spectacular. We took a couple rides in Tommy’s boat on scenic Lake Glenville. Tommy and Steven Schaffer went kayaking, and there was a failed yet funny attempt at waterskiing.” The crew included David, Bradshaw Rost, Steven Schaffer, Michael Brettler

and Tommy Usdin, who planned the memorable weekend. Jamie Marshall and husband Greg Wicander sold their house in Old Greenwich, Conn., and moved to Millbrook N.Y., where they enjoy country life. She and Vicki Chesler get together a few times a year in Rhinebeck, which is halfway between Jamie’s house in Millbrook and Vicki’s in Olivebridge. Vicki saw freshman roommate Anne Garrison in September for a trip to the Elizabeth Islands with their husbands, Matt Kovner and David Hewitt. Anne and David live in San Diego but travel east yearly to visit family in New Hampshire. Vicki’s daughter, son-in-law and grandson moved to Philly in December, which gave her an excuse to visit Peter Flint and his wife, Denise, in their beautiful new home in Berwyn, Pa. Peter and Denise have two more grandchildren! Vicki’s other daughter moved to Chicago in February. Also in February, Vicki and Matt spent a few days in Nashville with Amanda Marshall Zingg and husband Christopher Zingg ’77; they enjoyed great music and the food and fun of Music City. Mark Teschner received his 11th Emmy for casting on General Hospital

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Correspondent: Brooke Perry Pardue, bppardue@gmail.com Nanette Posman was reunited with classmates Anne Roche Kraner, Alicia Vacaro Multer and Kathy Haalck Anderson in Phippsburg, Maine, on May 27, 2023, at a memorial service honoring their classmate, friend and “sister” Elizabeth (Beth) Holdridge Kniss. Beth passed away following a valiant nine-month battle against cancer. Her CC sisters recalled her unwavering devotion to her friends, adventurous spirit and wonderful sense of mischief. She had the unique talent of making everyone feel special and was always our biggest cheerleader.

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Camel field hockey teammates gathered in Providence, R.I., including Kathryn Dornan Smith, Paula Trearchis McGeady, Shelly Warman Santaniello, Charlene Toal Best, Susan Quigley Worley, Caroline Shepard Bolick and Jane McKee Douglas Laurie Anderson Warnock has lived in New Hampshire for 35 years. She’s grown where she’s planted, married a good guy, and raised two daughters and many dogs. She’s been the “Face of Poison” for 12 years, a New Hampshire educator for the Northern New England Poison Center, and chairs the select board in town. She travels whenever possible and if lucky, gets together with her ConnChord women (Lucy Marshall West, Valerie Gutwirth, Judy Fox, Sharon Tobey Miller, Ruth Haas-Castro and

Sarah Babbitt ’85) now and then to sing, drink and laugh. Interestingly, Gayle Brady Finkelstein ’83 and Amy Hanoain Fontana ’95 are also poison prevention educators in Vermont and Connecticut. Who knew CC bred poison ladies?! Last June, Lucy Marshall West retired from public school education, serving as an assistant principal at the end of her career. She and her husband now travel and spend time with their growing blended family around the country. She has pivoted her career to serve others as a life and recovery coach. She looks forward to connecting with classmates at the 40th reunion! Jane McKee Douglas P’15 has had a wonderful year of connections and reconnections. Her daughter made them grandparents, and her son, Robert Douglas ’15, “smartly married another CC grad,” Kate Adams ’16. They hosted their welcome party at Connecticut College.

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Correspondent: Sue Brandes Hilger; submit info to tinyurl.com/42kw95wf Jane Ach Kalmes continues to practice as a physician assistant after 34 years. Katherine Paxton-Williams looks forward to retiring in June. She’s been teaching since 1990, working for Portland (Ore.) Public Schools since 1998. After their historic strike in November (see last issue), she is finally DONE and ready to move on. Wish her luck! Ilisa Sohmer has lived in Florida for four years, a great place to operate Sohmer College Counseling—and Wendy Hermann Steele is her neighbor again for the first time since senior year in Hamilton! Paul Rogers still lives in Mystic, Conn., enjoying his 39-year (gasp!) career as an independent investment specialist. He and wife Clare celebrated their 37th anniversary and took a road trip through Pennsylvania; daughter Abby will graduate from Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Paul enjoys being in a text group with former Camel hoop teammates Jeff Wiener, Thomas Fleming, Peter Dorfman, Charlie McCaghey, John Bartolomei, Sam Gonzalez and John Fields Kimberly Norton Butler and son Graham were on campus attending the Admissions 101 program for high school juniors. They heard from the Acting Interim President Dr. Wong and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Andy Strickler. The day ended with dinner with a Conn

Barbara Goodman Wilson ’79 riding her horse Gloria in Florida in February.

Debra Daigle ’79 and her new cat, Mr. D.

L-R: Class of 1984 ConnChord alums Lucy Marshall West, Valerie Gutwirth, Sharon Tobey Miller, Laurie Anderson Warnock, Ruth Haas-Castro and Judy Fox during their most recent get-together.

Camel field hockey teammates recently gathered in Providence, R.I. L-R: Kathryn Dornan Smith ’84, Paula Trearchis McGeady ’84, Shelly Warman Santaniello ’84, Charlene Toal Best ’84, Susan Quigley Worley ’84, Caroline Shepard Bolick ’84 and Jane McKee Douglas ’84.

Kathy Paxton-Williams ’85 on strike with Portland, Ore., teachers in November

From tech to teaching the Galapagos

After 25 years in the tech industry, Jennifer Price Tuohy ’85 surprised herself by becoming a sixth grade Earth science teacher. Tuohy, who is from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and now lives in Tampa, majored in history and philosophy at Conn. She eventually earned an MBA from Florida State University’s College of Business. She was thriving in her tech career, which included a role at IBM, when her path took a turn.

“I really hadn’t planned to do anything else,” she says. “We had two kids and my husband and I decided one of us needed to scale back and focus on the kids. It was me.”

One of Tuohy’s first post-tech jobs was ensuring 150 kids at her son’s 13-hour crew regatta events were fed. She also did some grant writing, ran a vintage shop and refinished furniture. Subbing periodically at St. Mary’s Episcopal Day School in Tampa, the K-8 school her children had attended, laid the groundwork for her next career—especially once the pandemic hit in March 2020.

“The school was open the whole time, and they wanted to hire a full-time sub,” Tuohy explains. “A friend of mine and I did a job share for the whole year. Sometimes I was in pre-K, sometimes I was in eighth grade. Sometimes I was teaching math, sometimes I was teaching Latin. At the end of the year, their science teacher retired, so they asked if we wanted to teach science.”

In their shared classroom, Tuohy teaches Earth science to sixth graders one day while her colleague teaches general science to fifth graders the next. They plan lessons on their respective “off” days, and serve about 100 children between them. “We had a ton to learn,” Tuohy says. “The school has been great— they’ve given us a lot of training on curriculum, how to be a teacher, how to manage a classroom.”

St. Mary’s covered more than the basics, however. The school had an endowment fund earmarked for professional development, such as an advanced degree or educational trips. Tuohy already had the former. “Because of COVID, nobody had spent money for the past year and a half, and there was a lot of money, apparently, in that fund. They were begging people to use it.”

She and her fellow science teacher submitted three proposals. The first was to visit Cape Canaveral right in Florida. The sec-

ond was to attend space camp in Huntsville, Alabama (which Tuohy did eventually attend). And because they’d been told to dream big, Tuohy says, the third proposal was to go to the Galapagos. “They said, ‘We didn’t even look at the other two; we’re sending you to the Galapagos,’” Tuohy recalls. “We were giddy. We locked ourselves in our classroom and laughed.”

The two-week trip to the volcanic archipelago off the coast of Ecuador last summer included mostly college professors and high school geology teachers who studied volcanoes. “We were the only middle school teachers there and far and away the least knowledgeable,” Tuohy admits. But they were about to acquire a wealth of information about the Earth science field to share with their students in Florida.

The group of about a dozen educators traversed lava flows and lava tunnels and explored different types of volcanoes across three of the Galapagos’ 13 main islands. They also snorkeled and mingled with otters, turtles, sea lions, iguanas and giant land tortoises. “The fact that we were with scientists made it really interesting, because they were so enthused about the things they were seeing,” Tuohy says. “They knew what they were looking at and could explain it to us.”

Tuohy’s photos capture what she calls the stark, lunar landscape of the Galapagos. The snaps came in handy during a recent classroom lesson on soil formation back at St. Mary’s. “When lava erupts from a mountain, nothing can grow on it,” Tuohy notes. “I showed my students pictures and explained that when the lava first erupts, there is no soil and the rocks erode. Eventually, birds drop a seed and a tiny plant grows. These pioneer plants make way for a tropical rainforest eventually.”

As Tuohy reflects on her success in an unexpected field, she credits Conn for planting the seeds of her continuing education. “This has not been a very linear career,” she acknowledges. “I think part of being a liberal arts student is that you learn how to learn. You get to know a little bit about a lot of stuff. Teaching has been a reminder that I can learn new things, even at my age.” —Melissa Babcock Johnson

student at Harris. Graham was impressed with the free music lessons for all students and commented on how nice everyone was. Kim’s son Nicolas is spending a semester abroad in Seville, Spain, and eldest son Jackson landed a job in private equity for a Spanish bank; he’ll spend July in Madrid every year. Kim is a member of the town council, her town’s 12-person legislative body, and the co-chair of health and human services for the council. She plays lots of pickleball, frequently co-opting her husband and daughter Lilly to play too! Jane Rowan Windell has worked in various roles in education for 30+ years, mainly in Michigan public schools: early childhood/kindergarten/first-grade teacher, reading specialist, speech language pathologist, and now early-intervention home visitor with babies who are at risk for developmental delays. She completed a PhD in early childhood education at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., in 2020. Her Ph.D. focused on the preparation of early interventionists, and thanks to COVID, her defense and graduation hooding ceremony were both on Zoom. Jane

left public schools for a few years to teach at a local community college. After missing the direct service with families and children, she returned to the work that gives her joy while mentoring college students. She and her husband enjoy time at their lake house in Reading, Mich. She’s proud to share that she recently became a grandma to Mason; son Jonathan and daughter-in-law Jenna live in Chicago. Mason was born prematurely and spent a month in the neonatal intensive care unit. He is healthy now and thriving at home while his parents adjust to life with a newborn.

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Correspondent: Jenifer Kahn Bakkala, JKBBlue@gmail.com, 51 Wesson Terrace, Northborough, MA 01532, 508-5238930 Andrea Bianchi Wooten was in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical at the Coastal Center of Carolina, in Hilton Head, N.C., this spring. She played Genie Klein, Carole’s mother. Tracy Thomson Teare P’19 is part of a “growing

I’ve come to realize the immense value of CC friendships and strengthening those bonds.

— ALICIA HESSE-CLEARY ’90

herd of ’80s Camels”—she and husband Matthew Teare P’19, Christopher (Chip) Harris and Alison Edwards Curwen ’88—who all live in Yarmouth, Maine. After living and working in London for four years with their jobs, Mary Burke Tobias and husband Jose moved back to their home in Alexandria, Va., in October 2023. Their oldest daughter (27) works in Berlin, Germany; their youngest (25) has started her career in the D.C. area. “With both sets of our parents requiring more of our TLC, it felt like the perfect

time for me to shift career gears and explore a lifelong passion with a bit more flexibility. One year ago, my business partner and I started a stationery/paper products LLC, @writtengraciously, featuring watercolor commissions by our mutual French-born, London-based artist and friend.” Mary would love to hear from former CC classmates, particularly those in the D.C. area. Rena Whitehouse was named the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WIAC) coordinator of women’s lacrosse officials in January. She has over 14 years of experience assigning women’s lacrosse officials at the NCAA Division I, II and III levels, as well as for the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Helen Murdoch, Marjorie McEvoy Egan and Susan Brager Murphy enjoyed getting together in Boston’s North End. 89

Correspondent: Tamsen Bales Sharpless, camel89news@gmail.com Who says we’re too old to ski? Mary Haffenberg, Jessica Kethledge, Dodie Sutro Crawford,

Ilisa Sohmer ’85 and Wendy Herman Steele ’85 in Largo, Fla., in December 2023

First time on the slopes together in Jackson Hole, Wyo., for ’89ers Mary Haffenberg, Jessica Kethledge, Dodie Sutro Crawford, Tracy Smith, Julie Coltoff Adler, Karen Lloyd and Suzanne Drebes Smith

Tracy Smith, Julie Coltoff Adler, Karen Lloyd and Suzanne Drebes Smith met on the slopes for the first time in Jackson Hole, Wyo. They are all coming to Reunion in May and hope for a high turnout!

90Correspondent: Kristin Lofblad Sullivan, kls.sullivan@gmail.com Linda (Lynn) Denison Stoute writes from Waterford, Conn.: “After retiring from 30 years in health care, I researched my family’s genealogy and became an active member and volunteer in the Daughters of the American Revolution. I enjoy road trips throughout Connecticut to visit historical sites. This year my family tree was enriched because I became a great-grandmother. Each of my three children became first-time grandparents, including twins. Retirement has been wonderful!” Judith Guy-Cruz Ojeda retired from teaching after more than 33 years (combined private and public schools). Her second career—as a Connecticut real estate specialist—began last spring at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services of New England. “I am loving the transition from working with middle school children to helping adults accomplish their real estate dreams and ventures.” Alicia Hesse-Cleary writes: “As I journey through my aging years, I’ve come to realize the immense value of CC friendships and

strengthening those bonds.” Alicia embarked on a new career path in 2020, in mental health counseling, concierge mental health navigation and expressive art therapy for individuals and groups. Her focuses are trauma-informed care, anxiety and OCD, substance abuse recovery, and divorce recovery. “It’s been enriching to work with men-

During my free time, you will find me at some local spot dancing.

— KRISTEN WARD ’90

tal health startups while doing my clinical training with some of the most talented mental health care professionals in New England, serving children aged 7–22.” She enjoyed the CC holiday party in NYC in December, reuniting with Christin Shanahan Brecher, Moira Crouch and Nicholas Brown. “It was a delightful evening filled with reminiscing and catching up. But seriously, where were the rest of you? The party was a blast, and we even received stylish Camel hats,

which I now sport religiously during my runs. … Interesting nugget about CC’s Camel: According to a 70-some-year-old alumna, whose mother would be in her late 90s now, Conn earned the moniker ‘Camels’ in the 1940s. Allegedly, the school became associated with camels because the students were often seen wearing camel-hair coats, then-popular fashion among the Seven Sisters schools. While there’s a different story about the basketball coach/team naming us the Camels, I’m intrigued to explore this historical tidbit further. Have any other alumni heard about it?” Greer Kessel Hendricks volunteers for Achilles International, an organization that transforms the lives of people with disabilities through athletic programming and social connections. Most Saturday mornings find her in Central Park, wearing her bright-yellow Achilles Guide shirt, jogging alongside stroke victims, blind runners or any athlete who needs extra support. “I actually ran the NYC marathon in November to raise money for this incredible organization.” Go, Greer! Susan Lasher Knight is a Spanish teacher in a small town in upstate New York, enjoying her two grown children (from afar) and her empty nest with husband Eric. She’s had some Camel encounters recently, including Lauren Aguiar, Stacy Larrenaga Penna, Joseph Luft and Erika Riddington. “Look me up if you’re ever in Cooperstown!” Josh Motta lives in Jamaica Bay Village in Fort Myers, Fla., where he volunteers three days a week at his church. Kristen Ward purchased a townhouse in Orange County, Calif., where she lives with her 13-yearold Yorkie. She works with a device company, Tandem Diabetes, teaching doctors, nurses and patients about insulin pump therapy. “During my

T he Connecticut College Athletic Hall of Fame, created in 1989, honors those who have brought distinction to themselves and the College through their achievement, commitment, sportsmanship and leadership in athletics.

Anyone can nominate a Connecticut College alumni athlete to the Athletic Hall of Fame. Inductees may include alumni, coaches, faculty members, administrators or friends of the Connecticut College community and teams that are exceptionally distinguished through outstanding achievement or significant accomplishment.

The College will induct the next classes to the Hall of Fame during Fall Weekend 2024.

To nominate a person or team for the Athletic Hall of Fame, please scan: ►

Dan Hardrick ’90, Deirdre Joyner Hardrick ’91, Suzanne Levin Glazer ’90, Judith Guy-Cruz Ojeda ’90, Janet Fossum Flink ’90 and Tobe Stomberg ’90

Miles Ladin ’90 and Judith Guy-Cruz Ojeda ’90 at a recent NYC brunch meetup

free time, you will find me at some local spot dancing.” She invites other Camels in the SoCal area to reach out. “It would be nice to connect.” Christin Shanahan Brecher is a co-producer on Suffs, a new Broadway musical opening in April, about the suffragist Alice Paul and the fabulous women—her fellow Suffs—who helped get the vote for women in the U.S. only a hundred years ago. “The cast is amazing, rehearsals have started and the marquee is shining over West 45th Street. Get your tickets now!” Jodi Simon Stewart and Jason Stewart recently celebrated 30 years of marriage. They have three amazing kids—Rian (25), Will (20) and Bella (17)—and have lived in Ridgefield, Conn., for 20 years. Jodi and Bella spent the past six years volunteering as part of the Ridgefield chapter of the National Charity League, a mother/daughter service organization, volunteering together for the town’s nonprofit organizations. Dan Hardrick, Deirdre Joyner Hardrick ’91, Suzanne Levin Glazer, Judith Guy-Cruz Ojeda, Janet Fossum Flink and Tobe Stomberg celebrated milestone events together. Miles Ladin and Judith GuyCruz Ojeda had a recent NYC brunch meetup.

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Correspondent: Daniella Garran, dkgarran@gmail.com Jennifer Lapan Mann serves as secretary of CC’s Alumni Association Board of Directors. During their February meeting, also attended by board vice president Saveena Dhall, several directors enjoyed a night of bowling in Leamy Hall at the Coast Guard Academy. Also in attendance were Jacob Nozaki ’22, Denise Wheeless ’80, Mario Laurenzi ’90, Veronica Venture ’86, Harris Rosenheim ’09, I. Chip Clothier ’79 P’10, An-Ming Sze Truxes ’71, Mike Boswell ’10 and M. Grant Hogan ’07. It was a blast! Karin Weaver Rohn and Miriam Conaway-Morrison reunited for a fun weekend with their youngest children touring colleges and sightseeing around Boston.

Chelsea Preston ’16 married Harry Erickson in September 2023 in Lake Placid, N.Y. L-R: Sophie Marsden ’16, Blake Alessandroni ’15, Sam Hooper ’16, Lily Cannon ’16, Harry Erickson, Chelsea Preston Erickson ’16, Lauren Munhall ’16, Natalia Resor ’16, Maggie Hogan ’16, Victoria Pucci Pierog ’16, Erin Moran ’16, Cassidy Luing ’16, Max Luing ’16 and Maggie Maloney ’16

Douglas ’15 (son of Jane McKee Douglas ’84 P’15) and Kate Adams ’16 were married over the summer. They hosted their welcome party at Connecticut College.

Births

Robert

Michael Boswell ’10, wife Amanda and big brother Mateo welcomed baby Luca in October 2023.

Karin Weaver Rohn ’94 and Miriam Conaway-Morrison ’94 reunited for a fun weekend with their youngest children touring colleges and sightseeing around Boston.

Jennifer Lapan Mann ’94 and Saveena Dhall ’94 returned to campus for the February alumni board meeting and enjoyed bowling at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

Sarah Schnitman Wilson ’14 married Joe Wilson in New Haven, Conn., on Dec. 2, 2023. L-R: (top row)

Pamela Kowalczyk ’74, Lois Bures ’74, Brooke Dinsmore ’14, Graham Nelson ’14, Joe Wilson, Patrick Russo ’14, Katie Morgan ’14, Cassandra Saimond ’14, Emmaline Deihl ’14; (bottom row)

Sarah Pincus ’14, Jeffrey Carmichael ’14, Sarah Schnitman Wilson ’14, Katie Surrey ’14 and Katie Regan ’14

L-R: Mark Fiskio ’79 P’17 and his wife, Gail Finnerty Fiskio ’78 P’17, at their son Jack’s wedding in Nashville, Tenn. in the fall of 2023; Emilie Fiskio ’17 (Jack’s sister) with Jay Faber ’79; Jim Glick ’79 and wife Sa also attended the wedding.

Christina Koerte ’06 and Jon Christ welcomed daughter Annelise Mara on Feb. 9, 2024. She joins big brother Jack and her exhausted but thrilled parents in Charlotte, N.C.

02

Claudia Bachmann-Bouchard received a scholarship to attend the NECTFL Conference in NYC. The Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages serves educators in all languages, at all levels from kindergarten through university, in both public and private settings. The 2024 conference theme is “Our Butterfly Effect: Creating a Lasting Impact.” Attendees will consider the impact the conference has made on the field during its 70-year history.

03

Timothy Stevens was selected to the Critics Choice Association’s Super Awards Nominating Committee. The Super Awards are devoted to the best offerings in sci-fi, fantasy and action film and television. While still not a superhero, this makes him officially superhero-adjacent.

04

Correspondent: Nora Mirick Guerrera, noramguerrera@gmail.com Annie Tselikis and Emily Serrell Smith met up in Seattle in November while they were both in town for conferences. Smith lives in Steamboat Springs, Colo., and is the VP of partner success at CollegeVine. Annie lives in Portland, Maine, and is the director of marketing for Slade Gorton Seafood. They offer this PSA: Always share your work travel plans with your college friends—you never know when or where you will cross paths. Abigail Ritchie DeMarzo,

Rebecca Arnold Prescott and Brianna Balboni met up in Boston, Mass. They’re thankful for CC and putting the three of them in the same place to develop a still-strong, 20-year bond. They all live and work on the South Shore and Cape, so they get their (seven in total) kids together several times a year and reserve nights out to catch up, reminisce and reconnect.

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Correspondent: Julia Jacobson, julia.jacobson@gmail.com Boston-area Camels met up for a winter cookout at Makena Cahill’s home. Alums present: Lindsey Abbey Lane, Makena Cahill, Shayna Crowell Lambrechts, Nate Dooley-Hayes, Virginia (Ginny) Fuller Marinaro, Will Grosvenor, Edward (Ned) Leutz, Meghan Lucy Holt ’07, Katherine McCord, Marisa Olsen and Erin Riley Christina Koerte and Jon Christ welcomed daughter Annelise Mara on Feb. 9. She joins big brother Jack and her exhausted but thrilled parents in Charlotte, N.C.

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Correspondent: Grace Astrove, gca1223@gmail.com Robinson+Cole is pleased to announce the promotion of Trevor Bradley to counsel, effective Jan. 1, 2024. Trevor is a member of the firm’s Business Litigation and Intellectual Property + Technology Groups. His commercial litigation practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and competition claims, including noncompete, trade

secret, and unfair and deceptive trade practices claims. In addition, he is a member of the firm’s Manufacturing Team and has extensive experience litigating product-related claims, including class actions, mass tort claims, and supply chain disputes for manufacturers and distributors in a range of industries facing significant exposure. He has obtained successful results for his clients in the state and federal courts throughout the United States. Trevor is a resident in the firm’s Stamford and New York offices. In October 2023, Michael Boswell and wife Amanda welcomed baby Luca, who joins big brother Mateo.

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Sarah Schnitman Wilson married Joe Wilson on Dec. 2, 2023. Alums in attendance included Pamela Kowalczyk ’74, Lois Bures ’74, Brooke Dinsmore, Graham Nelson, Patrick Russo, Katie Morgan, Cassandra Saimond, Emmaline Deihl, Sarah Pincus, Jeffrey Carmichael, Katie Surrey and Katie Regan

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Chelsea Preston married Harry Erickson in September 2023 in Lake Placid, N.Y. Camels in attendance included Sophie Marsden, Blake Alessandroni ’15, Sam Hooper, Lily Cannon, Harry Erickson, Chelsea Preston Erickson, Lauren Munhall, Natalia Resor, Maggie Hogan, Victoria Pucci Pierog, Erin Moran, Cassidy Luing, Max Lusophieing and Maggie Maloney

Remembering Professor Kumi Ogano

KumiOgano, adjunct professor of music, died March 9 of natural causes related to congestive heart failure. Ogano taught piano at Connecticut College for the last 30 years, having joined our faculty in 1994.

Ogano graduated from Toho-Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo in 1978 and received an artist’s diploma with highest distinction in 1982 from the Indiana University School of Music, where she studied with Gyorgy Sebok, James Tocco, Kiyoko Tanaka and Aiko Iguchi.

She earned universal acclaim as one of the authoritative performers of music by Japanese composers Toru Takemitsu and Akira Miyoshi. The New York Times praised her playing as “gracefully voiced, sensitively shaped and richly emotional,” and The Asahi wrote, “Her rich musicality and technical virtuosity are simply amazing.”

Ogano won first prize in the Rikskonsertene Competition in Oslo in 1982, the bronze medal in the Franz Liszt International Piano Competition in Budapest in 1986 and the Chopin Prize from The Frederic

Chopin Society of Japan in 1988. She appeared with major orchestras in Japan and Europe, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, the Tokyo Philharmonic, the Japan Philharmonic, the New Japan Philharmonic and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. She also performed in recitals and appeared frequently on radio and television throughout Japan, Belgium, Norway, Hungary, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Ogano is survived by her niece and nephew in Japan, as well as her many friends, colleagues and students.

Claudia BachmannBouchard ’02 received a scholarship to attend the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in NYC.

Abigail Ritchie DeMarzo ’04, Rebecca Arnold Prescott ’04 and Brianna Balboni ’04 met up in Boston, Mass.

Annie Tselikis ’04 and Emily Serrell Smith ’04 crossed paths in Seattle in November while they were both in town for conferences.

Jacob Nozaki ’22, Denise Wheeless ’80, Mario Laurenzi ’90, Veronica Venture ’86, Harris Rosenheim ’09, I. Chip Clothier ’79 P’10, Jennifer Lapan Mann ’94, An-Ming Sze Truxes ’71, Mike Boswell ’10 and M. Grant Hogan ’07 returned to campus for the Alumni Association Board of Directors meeting in February and went bowling at USCGA.

Boston-area Camels met up for a winter cookout at the home of Makena Cahill ’06 and took this photo of the next generation of Camels. Alumni present included Lindsey Abbey Lane ’06, Makena Cahill ’06, Shayna Crowell Lambrechts ’06, Nate Dooley-Hayes ’06, Ginny Fuller Marinaro ’06, Will Grosvenor ’06, Ned Leutz ’06, Meghan Lucy Holt ’07, Katherine McCord ’06, Marisa Olsen ’06 and Erin Riley ’06.

1940s

Sally Schley Manegold ’41 died December 3, 2023

Mary Moran Doherty ’43 died January 3, 2024

Virginia Foss Post ’43 died January 28, 2024

Alicia Henderson Speaker ’43 died November 30, 2023

Harriet Babcock Brown ’45 died December 25, 2023

Ruth Veevers Mathieu ’45 GP’10 died January 26, 2024

Marie Bloomer Patterson ’46 died January 12, 2024

Deane Austin Smigrod ’46 died March 7, 2024

Katharine Wile Bassett ’47 died December 5, 2022

Dorothy Psathas Sargeant ’48 died November 22, 2023

Frances Brigham Johnson ’49 died January 27, 2024

Carol Young Pomeroy ’49 died December 4, 2023

Gretchen Van Syckle Whalen ’49 died December 30, 2023

1950s

Ludmila Komeck Sabatiuk ’50 died December 19, 2023

Jane Ford Barker ’51 died December 7, 2023

Lauralee Lutz ’51 died May 25, 2023

Libby Dietz Miller ’51 died January 15, 2024

Elizabeth Hamilton Glasfeld ’52 died December 23, 2023

Barbara Gueinzius Gridley ’52 GP’12 died February 14, 2024

Linda Makela Mulford ’54 died February 29, 2024

Margaret Streifler Barton ’55 died February 11, 2024

Sylvia Doane Milne ’55 died December 13, 2023

Deborah Gutman Cornelius ’56 died September 13, 2023

Jill Long Leinbach ’56 died February 22, 2024

Ruth Milliken Reece ’56 died December 29, 2023

Esther Skokan Bennett ’57 P’87 died February 10, 2024

Mary Handley ’58 died December 9, 2023

Anne Richardson Johnson ’58 died December 14, 2023

Lois Schwartz Zenkel ’58 died March 8, 2024

Juliane Solmssen Steedman ’59 died January 5, 2024

Sallie Perkins Sullivan ’59 died December 19, 2023

1960s

Ruth Yaffe Radin ’60 died December 14, 2023

Ruth Barngrove Sauer ’60 died October 21, 2023

Gertrude Bland ’61 died December 13, 2023

Martha Guida Young ’62 died January 7, 2024

Susan Farrington ’63 died January 28, 2024

Darcy Jo Miller Austin ’64 died January 26, 2024

Patricia Arnold Onion ’64 died November 26, 2023

Remembering Antonia Souffront

Antonia Souffront, a member of the Dining Services staff staff since 2012, died March 28 after a courageous battle with cancer.

Souffront was a dedicated and supportive friend who fought until the end and always remained positive. Her warmth, dedication and kindness made her a valued member of the Dining Services team, and her absence leaves a void that will be deeply felt by many members of the Conn community.

Nita Butler Kincaid ’65 died December 8, 2023

Barbara Sears Wojtkiewicz ’65 died November 21, 2023

Deborah Small Russell ’67 died December 3, 2023

Leah Taylor Spitz ’67 died February 24, 2024

Helen Harasimowicz Walters ’69 died November 7, 2023

1970s

Trevor Jones ’73 died January 21, 2024

Elise Mallon Ford ’74 died January 13, 2020

John “Bob” Himes ’74 died April 20, 2019

Maxine Olderman ’74 died February 9, 2022

Paula Savoie Roll ’74 died February 26, 2024

Christopher Phinney ’78 died November 11, 2023

Alexander Combs ’79 P’93 died February 15, 2024

1980s

Louise Fabrykiewicz ’81 died December 12, 2023

Elizabeth Holdridge Kniss ’81 died April 22, 2023

Letha Pittman ’81 died January 26, 2021

Alan Tafapolsky ’83 died April 11, 2023

Winton Porterfield ’86 died January 25, 2024

1990s

Florence Sammataro ’91 died January 3, 2024

Stephanie Bewlay Sullivan ’92 died February 6, 2024

Alexander Musser ’96 died January 13, 2024

Antoinette Hulse ’97 died January 31, 2024

Peggy Sperling Galanty ’99 died February 3, 2024

2000s

Erica Stacy ’02 died January 12, 2024

Anna Klauder ’04 died January 29, 2024

Katherine Seaton ’04 died January 1, 2024

Faculty and Staff

Robert L. Hampton, former sociology professor and dean of the college, died October 19, 2023

Kumi Ogano, adjunct professor of music, died March 9, 2024

Antonia Souffrant, Oasis Snack Shop attendant, died March 28, 2024

Alumni deaths as reported to CC between 12/1/2023 and 3/11/2024

Souffront started at Conn as an on-call staffer in 2012 at the Jane Addams Dining Hall. She moved to the Oasis Snack Shop full time just shy of a year later. She was a dedicated Snack Shop employee, stepping in to lead the group when needed. She was well liked and respected by all.

Most importantly, Souffront was a devoted mother to her two sons. They were her world. She never gave up hope that she would win

the battle over cancer, but one colleague recounted a conversation following her diagnosis: “I told her how incredibly strong I thought she was and that I was blown away by her strength. She responded: ‘If I pass, my boys are going to remember me as a happy mom.’”

Souffront is survived by her loving family and her many friends and colleagues.

Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon

The Connecticut College community joined a nationwide crowdsourcing effort to transcribe letters written to and by Frederick Douglass, a Black activist who was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, escaped to New York City at age 20, and went on to become an internationally renowned antislavery lecturer and writer. February is Black History Month in part due to Douglass celebrating his unknown birthday on Feb. 14, now known as Douglass Day.

Shain Library staffers Jessica McCullough, director of research support and curricular technology; Andrew Lopez, research support librarian and interim director of Africana

Studies; and Lyndsay Bratton, director of digital scholarship, brought the campaign to Conn.

“Getting students to engage with these projects is great because it shows them how primary sources and documents get put on the web,” Bratton said. “It’s stuff they use all the time in their research but don’t necessarily think about how it got there.”

On Feb. 14 between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., students and professors gathered around tables in the Blaustein Humanities Center’s Hood Dining Hall, staring intently at their laptop screens as they worked to decipher the elaborate 19thcentury cursive handwriting adorning some of the General Correspondence

series of the Library of Congress’s 8,731 pages of the Frederick Douglass Papers.

“It was really fun. We kept hearing students saying, ‘This is so cool!’” McCullough said. Bratton added, “They jumped right in.”

Zach Wheat ’26, a computer science major and environmental studies minor from Northampton, Massachusetts, was camped out alone by the window that afternoon and had been there since the morning. “I’m really interested in history and archiving,” he said.

The Transcribe-a-thon is presented by Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research along with the Library of Congress’s online transcription platform, By the People.

Sean D. Elliot

OCT. 18-20, 2024

Join parents, students and alumni to celebrate fall with your Camel family.

ATHLETICS | THEATER | MUSICAL PERFORMANCES | EDUCATIONAL SESSIONS

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Connecticut College wrapped up its seven-year Defy Boundaries campaign, bringing in a record $317.5 million which contributed to important campus revitalizations, like Kohn Waterfront, pictured above. Story page 18.

Eliza Ritter ’27 high-fives her teammates as the Women’s Lacrosse team prepares to face Westfield State on Silfen Field in March. The Camels won 11-9.

Sean D. Elliot